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Summary
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
From award-winning crime writer Belinda Bauer, "the true heir to the great Ruth Rendell" [ Mail on Sunday (UK)], Snap is a gripping novel about a teenage boy's hunt for his mother's killer.
Jack's in charge, said his mother as she disappeared up the road to get help. I won't be long. Now eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters wait on the hard shoulder in their stifling, broken-down car, bickering and whining and playing I-Spy until she comes back.
But their mother doesn't come back. She never comes back. And after that long, hot summer's day, nothing will ever be the same again.
Three years later, Jack's fifteen now and still in charge . . . alone in the house. Meanwhile across town, a young woman called Catherine While wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note reading I could of killed you . The police are tracking a mysterious burglar they call Goldilocks, for his habit of sleeping in the beds of the houses he robs, but Catherine doesn't see the point of involving the police. And Jack, very suddenly, may be on the verge of finding out who killed his mother.
A twisty, masterfully written novel that will have readers on the edge of their seats, Snap is Belinda Bauer at the height of her powers.
Author Notes
Belinda Bauer is the author of seven previous award-winning novels that have been translated into twenty-one languages. She lives in Wales.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The gripping opening of this uneven thriller from Bauer (The Beautiful Dead) finds 11-year-old Jack Bright and his two younger sisters left in a car on a British motorway by their mother, Eileen, after a breakdown one summer day in 1998. Losing patience, Jack ventures out of the car in search of his mother only to find a phone booth with a receiver left dangling off the hook. When the police eventually rescue the three siblings, Jack learns that his mother's call for assistance was recorded, but her words were cut off abruptly after she reported that someone in a car was pulling over to help her. Eileen is later found stabbed to death. In 2001, pregnant Catherine While scares off a stranger who breaks into her West Country home; later, she finds a knife next to a birthday card her mother sent her. The message in the card had been crossed out and replaced with the words "I could have killed you." The plot lines predictably overlap, but in a way that feels contrived. Bauer fans will hope for a return to form next time. Agent: Jane Gregory, Gregory & Co. (U.K.). (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Bauer secures her place as a star in the British psychological-suspense firmament with this tightly written tale of Jack, a young boy who turns to crime after his mother's brutal murder. Jack and his two sisters, Joy and baby Merry, are left alone twice first, when their mother's car breaks down on the M5 motorway and she leaves them to find help, and again, three years later, when their father abandons the children, unable to cope with his grief. At 11 years old, Jack is now the man of the house, left to steal items he can sell to a petty-crime ringleader for cash to support his younger sisters. They get by just under the radar, but Joy is mentally unstable, Merry is unschooled, and the whole house is buried under thousands of newspapers that Joy scours for mentions of the unsolved crime that ruined their lives. When Jack is convinced he's found the weapon used to murder his mother in a home he's burgling, his already unraveling life descends further into chaos. Bauer's characters (including DCI John Marvel, who has appeared in some of her previous novels) are richly drawn and her plotting is impeccable. Even the most bizarre circumstances and red herrings make perfect sense. Readers who miss Ruth Rendell are sure to become fast Bauer fans.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CENSUS, by Jesse Ball. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) A fatally ill father travels across the country with his adult son, who has Down syndrome. There are flashes of surrealism and melancholy - the man works for a shadowy census bureau, and brands the people he meets on their ribs after their encounters - but "there is rapture, too, and compassion and the consolations of storytelling," our critic Parul Sehgal wrote. THE FIGHTERS: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, by CJ. Chivers. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) Chivers, a writer for The Times and a Marine veteran, dives into the on-the-ground experiences of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our reviewer, Robert D. Kaplan, called it "a classic of war reporting," writing that it "could be the most powerful indictment yet of America's recent Middle East wars." SNAP, by Belinda Bauer. (Grove, $16.) The hero of this taut thriller is Jack, who as a teenager had to step up and raise his sisters after their mother's disappearance. When he discovers a talent for burglary, he begins breaking into homes, leaving his community rattled by the "Goldilocks" thief. Separately, a pregnant woman is taunted by her stalker, and a detective involved in both cases neatly ties up the stories. THERE ARE NO GROWN-UPS: A Midlife Comingof-Age Story, by Pamela Druckerman. (Penguin, $17.) The author, an American writer based in France known for her book "Bringing Up Bébé," details her long-dreaded shift from "mademoiselle" to "madame." She's candid about her expectations ("I've entered the stage of life where you don't need to be beautiful; simply by being well-preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty"); where they fell short; and what she learned, about life and herself, along the way. THE FEMALE PERSUASION, by Meg Wolitzer. (Riverhead, $17.) Wolitzer's 12th novel takes up the subject of intergenerational feminism, told through the story of a young woman and her entry into the women's movement. As a college student, Greer encounters Faith Frank, a charismatic celebrity-activist loosely modeled on Gloria Steinem. When Faith invites Greer into her inner orbit, everything Greer thought she'd ever wanted is called into question. THE SOUL OF AMERICA: The Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham. (Random House, $20.) Unnerved by the Trump presidency, white nationalist rallies and other developments, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian revisits moments when liberal values ultimately triumphed over fear and division - among them Reconstruction, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the era of McCarthyism.
Guardian Review
British novelist Belinda Bauer is at her considerable best when writing about children, and the opening chapter of her latest book, Snap (Bantam, £12.99), is one of the most vividly unnerving I have read. It¿s August 1998, and 11-year-old Jack has been left in charge of his young sisters in a hot, broken-down car in a layby on the M5 while their mother goes to call for help. When she doesn¿t return, they trudge down the road to find her, to be met with only the dangling receiver of the emergency phone. When her body is found, the children¿s father, unable to cope, leaves them to fend for themselves. Jack becomes proficient at burgling houses to support the family, and his habit of stealing food and taking naps in his victims¿ beds leads baffled local police to refer to him as ¿Goldilocks¿. Meanwhile, pregnant Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed with an ominous note, and DI John Marvel, his career in the doldrums and loathing his forced relocation from London to Somerset, longs for the chance to prove himself. Although Catherine¿s reasons for not reporting her alarming findings to either her husband or the police don¿t ring entirely true, Bauer deftly weaves these strands together for an intelligent mystery, written with razor-sharp observation and wry humour. There¿s more crime in the West Country ¿ this time Cornwall ¿ in Martyn Waites¿s The Old Religion (Zaffre, £12.99), which contains several nods to such folk-horror classics as The Wicker Man, although the murderous pagan rituals here are performed to bring prosperity to the fictional village of St Petroc. Former undercover policeman Tom Killgannon is in witness protection and fears for his life after 17-year-old Lila, on the run from a Travellers¿ commune after unwittingly participating in a kidnapping, breaks into his house and steals a jacket containing the documentation for his new identity. In trying to find her, Tom risks not only giving away his location to the gangs he¿s hiding from, but also becoming a target for her ruthless pursuers. A strong plot, a formidable air of menace and the avoidance of hillbilly horror cliche add up to a superbly executed cautionary tale about the malevolent force of parochialism. Steve Cavanagh¿s series featuring conman-turned-lawyer Eddie Flynn has been getting stronger with each book and Thirteen (Orion, £7.99) is the best yet. Set in New York, with a terrific hook, a thoroughly likable protagonist and more twists than a tornado, it¿s the story of the trial of Robert Solomon, one half of a Hollywood power couple, for the murder of his wife. The real killer, however, is not in the dock but on the jury, having offed one of the 12 in order to assume his identity. The race is on and Cavanagh sets a cracking pace as he switches between Flynn¿s perspective and that of the murderer in a genuine, read-in-one-sitting page-turner. The first novel by Korean bestseller You-jeong Jeong to be translated into English, The Good Son (Little, Brown, £16.99, translated by Chi-young Kim) begins with the 25-year-old narrator Yu-jin waking up in the family apartment covered in blood and then discovering his mother lying downstairs with her throat slit. He knows he went for a run the previous night, but remembers nothing more. However, he hasn¿t been taking his anti-seizure medication and for some reason his late father¿s cut-throat razor is in his room. Yu-jin¿s life begins to unravel as he attempts to fill in the gaps in his memory while hiding his mother¿s death from his perplexed stepbrother and aunt. He starts to discover things about himself that his mother had tried to keep hidden, and Jeong expertly inches up the tension in this crafty, creepy story of a psychopath¿s coming-of-age. Our Kind of Cruelty (Century, £12.99) by Araminta Hall offers a different but equally compelling take on male derangement, reminiscent of the late Ruth Rendell¿s wonderful psychological thriller Going Wrong. During their intense eight-year love affair, Mike and Verity played a sex game called ¿the Crave¿, which involved Mike ¿rescuing¿ Verity from the attentions of other men. At Verity¿s urging, Mike took a job in the US and, by the time he returned, the relationship had cooled. It soon becomes clear that Mike, who is busily furnishing a house for himself and Verity to live in, refuses to believe that she has moved on, even interpreting an invitation to her wedding as a challenging new twist in their old game. The extent to which she is manipulating him is never entirely clear, but this is a disturbing tale of obsession and a sobering reminder of how women are judged on their desires. An addition to the increasingly popular subgenre of ¿house thriller¿, The House Swap by Rebecca Fleet (Doubleday, £12.99) certainly has an intriguing premise: gaslighting by home exchange. An unhappily married couple leave their Leeds flat for a week¿s stay in London, and the wife has a creeping sense that a past love affair may be coming back to haunt her. Although there are some genuinely eerie moments, thin characterisation and an over-reliance on coincidence mean that the idea¿s considerable potential remains unfulfilled. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
The three children of a murdered woman hide in plain sight.Jack Bright, Bauer's (The Beautiful Dead, 2017, etc.) plucky main character, is only 14, but he's the sole support of what's left of his family. Three years ago, in 1998, Jack's mother, Eileen, left him and his two younger sisters in their broken-down car while she went in search of a roadside telephone. Her body was found several days later, and the children's father, after trying to cope, disappeared. Now, unbeknownst to social services and truancy officers, Jack and his sisters, Joy and Merry, still inhabit their clutter-bound family home. Jack and Merry maintain the exterior to put off authorities. Jack also maintains the family's fragile economy by burglarizing homes, stealing only healthy food and occasionally napping in a victim's bed. Thanks to the consistency of this M.O., the police call him the Goldilocks burglar, although they're not even close to identifying or nabbing him. The book's third-person perspective shifts among multiple characters, major and minor, but is always vividly real. Heavily pregnant Catherine, whose husband, Adam, is away on business, drives off an unseen home invader only to find an abalone-handled knife placed next to a scrawled note: "I could have killed you." A never entirely credible reluctance stops her from calling the police or telling Adam. Marvel, a senior detective exiled to "darkest Somerset" after a fall from grace at his London post, disdains the hunt for Goldilocks as much as he longs for a homicide case. Reynolds, a vain but deeply insecure detective, visits his aging mother often at her new home but ignores her concerns about the three seemingly feral children next door. Perspectives and offhand clues converge as Marvel finds that a rash of small-town burglaries just might lead to a career-salvaging murder investigation and to the cold case of Eileen Bright. All of the characters, though flawed human beings in varying degrees, are likable, which gets in the way of creating a convincing villain.This thriller, though gripping to the end, is a victim of its own niceness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Bauer's (The Beautiful Dead) latest thriller to star DCI Marvel follows 11-year-old Jack, who is left in charge of his two younger siblings when their car breaks down along the highway and his pregnant mother goes in search of help. She never returns and is later found murdered. Three years later, their father, unable to cope with his wife's death, abandons the family. Now 14, Jack turns to crime to support Joy and Merry, meticulously keeping up outside appearances while their home is slowly consumed by newspapers and filth. Meanwhile, Marvel is on the lookout for the notorious Goldilocks, a burglar who eats the food and sleeps in the beds of the people he robs. One morning a pregnant Catherine White wakes up to find a jagged knife next to the note, "I could have killed you." What she can't know is that the pearl-handled weapon may have been used to kill Jack's mother. VERDICT This dark, twisty, and gripping tale is a must-read for fans of Nicci French and Sophie Hannah. Readers who know Bauer's work will recognize the crotchety Marvel, though it's not necessary to have read the author's other books to enjoy this one.-Nanci Milone Hill, M.G. Parker Memorial Lib., Dracut, MA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
