"These complex characters can be cunning, deceitful, even mad-- which is exactly what makes them such absorbing company."

--The New York Times Book Review

"Minette Waiters is a master at building engrossing tales around a single, life-shattering event. In The Shape of Snakes, she does not disappoint The final page makes for an extremely moving conclusion by suddenly casting the entire book in a very different light--a neat trick that only someone as talented as Minette Walters could pull off."

--The Washington Post Book World

It took a few hours on a rainy winter night for a black woman known as "Mad Annie" to die in a gutter. It will take twenty years for the woman who found her to shape her neighbors’ racism, the indifference of the police, and her own rage into the truth...