writing about. With no series character tying her to particular people, places or times, she moves freely around settings – a sink estate (Acid Row), a Dorset village (Fox Evil), a suburb of London (The Shape of Snakes) – although every setting is 'claustrophobic' to encourage the characters 'to turn on each other'. Walters describes herself as an exploratory writer who never uses a plot scheme, begins with simple premises, has no idea 'whodunit' until halfway through a story, but who remains excited about each novel because she, along with her reader, wants to know what happens next. As part of the British project 'Quick Reads', to encourage literacy amongst adults with reading difficulties, Walters wrote a 20,000-word novella called Chickenfeed. In competition with works by other best-selling authors, such as Ruth Rendell, Maeve Binchy and Joanna Trollope, Chickenfeed has won two awards as the best novella in the 'Quick Reads' genre. It has also been translated into several languages. In September 2007, Walters released her fourteenth book, The Chameleon's Shadow, in the UK. On 3–7 March 2008, BBC2 aired Murder Most Famous, a five-part TV talent contest series, in which Walters tutors and judges six competing celebrity writers, with the winner having his or her crime fiction novel published by Pan Macmillan on World Book Day 2009. The contestants were Brendan Cole, Sherrie Hewson, Kelvin MacKenzie, Matt Allwright, Angela Griffin and Diarmuid Gavin. The series was won by the actress Sherrie Hewson, whose debut novel The Tannery was published in March 2009. After a pause of 10 years in which she wrote two novellas, Walters has decided to write historical novels. The first of these novels is The Last Hours, set during the Black Death, followed by a sequel, The Turn of Midnight. In 2019 Walters was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Dorset. Bibliography Novels The Ice House (1992) The Sculptress (1993) The Scold's Bridle (1994) The Dark Room (1995) The Echo (1997) The Breaker (1998) The Tinder Box (1999) (novella) The Shape of Snakes (2000) Acid Row (2001) Fox Evil (2002) Disordered Minds (2003) The Devil's Feather (2005) Chickenfeed (2006) (novella) The Chameleon's Shadow (2007) A Dreadful Murder (2013) (novella) The Cellar (2015) The Swift & the Harrier (2022) Black Death series The Last Hours (2017) The Turn of Midnight (2018) In addition to full-length novels, Walters has written feature articles for magazines and the broadsheets, some short