Snap: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Belinda Bauer weaves a dark, atmospheric and bleak crime story in the style of the darkest of fairytales, set in the West Country in Somerset. The focus lingers on the very young and the weight of the suffocating impact of life-changing events in its aftermath. But I totally agree that both are just lazy ways to achieve emphasis in a way that a better-worded sentence could have easily done. She has no idea where it came from and she makes a “snap” decision not to tell her husband about this which ends up almost costing her everything!

Two such opposite characters --one, Marvel, a detective who was moved down to this small town after apparently something went wrong with a murder case he was involved in. Goldilocks is happy with firm, soft, or ‘just-right’ beds for a little snooze while stealing the goods from people’s homes. I suppose that studying Scottish, Irish and Welsh in university helped a lot, otherwise it would be impossible to understand them. Its wonderful to watch the interplay between these two, so different, but they still trusted each other.I know that seems like it should be a given for a thriller, but having read many which fall flat on their faces in this regard, it is nice to read a proper page-turner. And I can’t end this review without commenting again on this book’s inclusion on the Man Booker longlist, which in itself caused quite a stir, raising the age-old question of whether genre fiction belongs in a literary prize. And just like so many killers in crime novels, this one uses a murder weapon that is unique and easily traceable – and the case is ultimately solved using information that was available to the police at the time of the murder. It is inhabited by a Goldilocks burglar, a child so traumatised, that he is drawn to homes with their pictures of happy families, living their lives of security and love, the antithesis of his own sorrowful, despairing and traumatised life.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. It’s undoubtedly pacey and gripping, with a fantastic concept: a woman leaves her children in her broken-down car to go get help, and she’s found murdered a week later. If you haven’t read Snap, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that the sheer amount of vitriol for this novel and its Man Booker nomination may stem from snobbery and a bias against genre fiction. Another recurring theme that haunts Jack is that no-one stopped to see what was the matter, no-one wanted to get involved. As you know from the blurb for the book, three young children are left alone on the side of the road way while their mother goes to find gas, or help, she gets neither, she is never coming back.Some Italian dialects are impossible for me, but then I’d say I’m more ‘proficient’ than ‘fluent’ so I was just curious if it was challenging for you even as a fluent English speaker. Three years later, Catherine, a young pregnant woman, wakes to find a knife laying alongside her in her bedroom. Although Jack embarks on a dangerous game to find his mother’s killer, and although the police, in the form of the gloriously misanthropic DCI John Marvel, are pulled into the hunt, it was exploring the psychology of the children that Bauer found “most interesting”. She was last seen over an hour before, walking away on the shoulder of the road towards a payphone to get help. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the opportunity to read this in exchange for my honest review. I’ve seen mixed reviews about Snap, and I would agree that grumpy detectives with a chip on their shoulder like Marvel are very prevalent in crime fiction and that I did have to suspend my disbelief at the neatness of some of the plotting, but I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed Snap nonetheless. On a sweltering day in 1998, 11 year old Jack, his younger sisters, Joy, and toddler, Merry, leave their broken down car to see what is keeping their pregnant mother, who had set out to phone for help.Picture a cat tumbling its ball of yarn, but in reverse; in the beginning it feels as if we have individual strings that we come to realize have been from the same segment all along. There’s a bit of back and forth from 1998 – the year of the disappearance – and 2001 when Inspector Marvel, formerly a murder detective from London, rocks up in a provincial police station and is tasked with investigating a spate of burglaries. But the most insufferable thing about this book – aside from the exclamation points – was the fact that Bauer just shows her hand too early. By contrast, his boss (Marvel) is large and unkempt in appearance, colloquial and blunt in his expressions.

His mum says to him: ‘You’re in charge, Jack,’ as she walks away from the car, and three years later he’s still in charge, trying to keep all the balls in the air, everybody alive, hidden from the authorities, in this terrible house, which is now full of newspapers which his sister collects obsessively to try and find clues about his mother’s death. But although this text meets the (rather broad) Booker entry criteria, it is absurd to include it in the longlist.Belinda Bauer's plots are never anything less than original and unsettling, and Snap is no exception. He’s a fastidious, impeccably groomed straight arrow who’s always willing to help coworkers better themselves. When I visited Liverpool, I was so desperate, I couldn’t understand a thing, I thought I was useless. Detectives Marvel and Reynolds are investigating the robberies in the area and eventually they get involved with helping Jack look for his mother’s killer. She gets inside the heads and hearts of her characters to provide a rich, deep and often humorous viewpoint.