The Breaker - Couverture souple

Twelve hours after Kate Sumner’s broken body is washed up on a deserted beach on the south coast of England, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away walking the streets of Poole, alone. The police are puzzled.

Why weren’t mother and daughter together? Why was Kate killed and her daughter allowed to live? More curiously, why had Kate boarded a boat – apparently willingly – when she was scared stiff of drowning at sea? Who had tempted her to her death?

The police suspect a young actor, a loner with an appetite for pornography, who lies about his relationship with Kate and whose sailing boat, Crazy Daze, is moored just yards from where the toddler was found…

As the investigation proceeds, the police discover a gaping hole in Kate’s husband’s alibi. Was he really in Liverpool at a conference the night she died? Was Kate the “respectable woman” he claims she was?

And why does their daughter scream in terror every time he tries to pick her up…?

The broadcast of the brilliant film adaptations of her novels on Showcase has crowned Minette Walters the new Canadian queen of British mystery writers. Her career has been little short of astonishing: With her debut novel, The Ice House, she won the British Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Award for the best first crime novel of 1992. Her second mystery, The Sculptress, won the U.S. Edgar Allan Poe Award for the best crime novel published in 1993. In 1994, she achieved a unique triple when The Scold’s Bridle was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year. Her fourth novel, The Dark Room, received further critical acclaim when it appeared in 1995. The Echo, her fifth novel, was said by many reviewers to be her best, most intriguing mystery to date. Her sixth novel, The Breaker, was similarly praised and her seventh, The Shape of Snakes, was published to rave reviews. Minette Walters lives in Dorset, England.