While raising Walters and her two brothers, Colleen Jebb painted miniatures from photographs to supplement the family's income.

During a gap year between school and Durham University, 1968, Walters volunteered in Israel with The Bridge in Britain, working on a kibbutz and in a delinquent boys' home in Jerusalem.

Within four months, it had won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey award for best first novel[3] and had been snapped up by 11 foreign publishers.

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.

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.

On 3–7 March 2008, BBC2 aired Murder Most Famous,[5] 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.

Minette has written another entry in the Quick Reads series entitled A Dreadful Murder for World Book Day 2013.