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The Scold's Bridle
'I wonder if I should keep these diaries under lock and key.
Jenny Spede has disturbed them again...What does she make, I wonder, of
an old woman, deformed by arthritis, stripping naked for a young man?
The pills worry me more. Ten is such a round number to be missing...'
Mathilda Gillespie's body was found nearly two days after she had taken
an overdose and slashed her wrists with a Stanley knife. But what shocked
Dr Sarah Blakeney the most was the rusted metal cage obscuring the dead
woman's face - a scold's bridle grotesquely adorned with a garland of
nettles and Michaelmas daisies. What happened at Cedar House in the tortured
hours before Mathilda's death?
Detective Sergeant Cooper, an elderly policeman nearing retirement, is
under pressure from his superiors to bring in a verdict of suicide. And
even Mathilda's daughter and granddaughter insist that illness drove her
to commit the desperate, final act. Only Sarah and her husband, Jack,
refuse to believe that the Mathilda they knew would have taken her own
life. Then comes the reading of Mathilda's Last Will and Testament, which
shocks her family into a stunned and bitter silence. For Dr Sarah Blakeney
- Mathilda's GP for barely a year - has inherited everything.
Already deeply troubled by recent events, Sarah is thrown into turmoil
as she suddenly becomes the target of some vicious local gossip. Almost
everyone in Fontwell, it seems, had loathed Mathilda Gillespie - even
enough to want her dead. With Sergeant Cooper her only ally, Sarah decides
to find out why. But only Mathilda's diaries can fully explain the life
she led before her terrible death. And Mathilda's diaries have disappeared...
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'This third mystery
should solidify her position as one of the most impressive new
talents in the field. It's an English village mystery with a
difference, about an old woman found dead in her bath with a
scold's bridle – a medieval muzzle used to silence nagging
women – over her head. Walters, who is often compared with
Ruth Rendell and PD James, is perhaps even more compulsively
readable.'
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| Denver Post |
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