The Scold's Bridle by Minette Walters Macmillan $255 IT'S the kind of book that creeps up on you. No sooner have you progressed from thinking the murder on the opening pages a little far-fetched and ridiculous to deciding it has interesting possibilities than you find yourself hooked and staying for the long haul.
Not that it's over-long at about 300 pages. The type is large and easy to read, the flow smooth and the tension, though not nail-biting, palpable enough for the ''just one more page'' syndrome to set in as you read on.
Minette Walters is an English magazine editor turned full-time writer whose first two novels, The Ice House and The Sculptress, were award-winning, critically acclaimed and are both being adapted for television.
Here she proves to the reader coming to her for the first time that her success is deserved, her hand sure and her mind capable of the perverse twists that characterise the likes of Ruth Rendell who lift murder mysteries out of the realms of the plain old whodunit and into those of the psychological thriller.
Its main character, Mathilda Gillespie, 65, is dead from page one. But she dominates every page, as Sergeant Tommy Cooper sets out to decide whether she died by her own hand or someone else's - and if she was murdered, by who.
Mathilda dies in a manner as twisted, perverse and violent as her own life is revealed to have been, both by the investigations into her death and through the page of her diaries that opens every chapter.
