Winner, Gold Dagger Award (Best Crime Novel), Crime Writers' Association Awards (UK),1994
Mathilda Gillespie has been dead for days. Her corpse lies in the bath. Pills have spilled on the floor. She has used a Stanley knife to slash her wrists. Or has she? Obscuring the old woman's face is a rusted metal cage - a scold's bridle grotesquely laced with nettles and daisies. But even this obscenity - designed to silence the wagging tongue of a nag - arouses no pity in those who knew Mathilda best.
Detective Sergeant Cooper is pressured to call it suicide. Dr Sarah Blakeney doesn't agree. Sarah has seen a different side to the dead woman - but her defence of Mathilda begins to look odd when the time comes to read the Will. Young Dr Blakeney has inherited everything - intensifying the desperate bitterness that has driven Mathilda's daughter and granddaughter to wish the old woman dead.
Isolated by gossip and suspicion, and at odds with her artist husband, Sarah knows only that she must make sense of what has torn apart generations of women and left a trail of grief that may only be explained in Mathilda's own diaries. But along with all clues as to one possible killer among many - Mathilda's detailed, shocking diaries have also disappeared.