The Shape of Snakes - Tapa blanda

November 1978. And in a London suburban street, a disturbed West Indian woman is apparently the victim of a road accident. Yet the young married woman who narrates this mesmerising tale and found her dying at the roadside, is strangely convinced that she was murdered. This leads to her spending the next 20 years doggedly digging out the truth from what turns out to be a cesspool of intrigue and lies from which some terrible truths finally emerge. Letters and photographs are intermittently inserted into an insidiously spellbinding narrative that culminates in a shockingly believable climax.

November 1978. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets - and somewhere is West London a black woman dies in a rain-soaked gutter. Her passing would have gone unmourned but for the young woman who finds her and who believes - apparently against reason - that Annie was murdered. But whatever the truth about Annie - whether she was as mad as her neighbours claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said - something passed between her and Mrs Ranelagh in the moment of death which binds this one woman to her cause for the next twenty years. But why is Mrs Ranelagh so convinced it was murder when by her own account Annie died without speaking? And why would any woman spend twenty painstaking years uncovering the truth - unless her reasons are personal . . . ?