This is an unusual thriller told from the point of view of a child, 14 year old Jack Bright. It starts in 1998 when Jack is 11 and his two younger sisters 9 and 3. They are all in a broken down car on the hard shoulder of the motorway waiting for their mother who has gone to get help. After an hour she has not returned so they set off after her but she is nowhere to be found. They arrive at a dangling motorway phone but cannot see their mother.
The story then fast forwards 3 years and 14 year old Jack is looking after his sisters. His mother is dead, murdered by the motorway and his father has gone mad with grief and left the children alone.
Jack supports his family by breaking and entering houses when owners are away and becomes known as Goldilocks as he even sleeps in their beds.
Detectives Marvel and Reynolds set a trap to catch Goldilocks but in the meantime Jack discovers the knife which killed his mother in a house he has burgled.
This is a great story- the reader feels such sympathy for Jack as he struggles to look after his family- after all his mother left him in charge of his sisters as she went to get help.
He has never gotten over her murder and is desperate to find the killer. He will do anything to catch him, even allow himself to be captured by the police if it helps find the murderer.
Jack, Marvel and Reynolds form an unlikely alliance and try to prove that the homeowner with the knife is really Eileen Bright’s Killer.
I particularly like Jack as a character- he is a burglar but does feel guilty about his way of earning a living. Detective Marvel is gruff and rude both to suspects, witnesses and his own team and yet he is relentless in his pursuit of Eileen Bright’s murderer. In fact I rather liked him too although his methods were somewhat unorthodox.
This was an enjoyable thriller, both unusual and compelling. Belinda Bauer’s books are always written from a different perspective and this is no exception. Highly recommended.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

“I could have killed you…”

I have enjoyed all of Belinda Bauer’s novels, that I have read so far, and I am pleased to say that this is no exception. It begins in 1998, when a car breaks down on the hard shoulder. While pregnant Eileen Bright gets out to walk to the emergency phone, eleven year old Jack is left in charge of his sisters – Joy, nine, and two year old Merry. However, their mum doesn’t come back…

Forwarding to 2001, the children are living alone in their house – a warren of newspapers stored, originally by their father, then by Joy, meaning that there is little room to do anything but edge past the piles of paper. Jack feels the burden of having to provide for his sisters and of trying to present a ‘normal’ front to nosy neighbours.

This novel has many threads. There is a burglar, nicknamed ‘Goldilocks,’ who breaks into the houses of people who are on holiday, and stays there – eating the food, using the bath and sleeping in the beds. There is Catherine While, happily married to Adam and pregnant with their child. However, her perfect life is about to be turned upside down when she is threatened by an unknown intruder.

Bauer weaves the strands of this novel expertly. There are so many wonderful characters – not only Catherine and Jack, but the old-fashioned Detective Chief Inspector, John Marvel, the prim and proper Detective Sergeant Reynolds and ‘Smooth Louis,’ with his toddler son – Baz (‘the Bazter). This is a story of courage, of coping against the odds, of suspicion of those close to you, imagining the unimaginable. Bauer increases the tension with every page of this fantastic crime novel, which romps unrelentingly towards the finish, daring you to put the book down - only you won’t be able to, as you will be desperate to know what happens. If you like intelligent, well plotted crime novels, with great characters, then this is for you.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

A dark and twisty thriller, well written and pacy. Bauer's skill at story telling means her characters and well rounded and the stoy flows effortlessly.

This one was a little difficult for me to rate. There isn't a lot wrong with the story at all, I just felt the pace was a bit sedentary and it never gave me that 'biting fingers' feeling.

Instead I meandered along with Jack almost feeling as lost as it seemed he was, waiting for his mother's killer to be brought to justice. There's no big reveal here, a few turns along the way but your path is almost marked out from the beginning.

One thing I didn't like was the lack of procedure followed by the police within the book and how they thought they could explain away evidence gained from illegal searches. This was baffling to me and there was no explanation from the author - probably because there isn't one. Quite simply, it wouldn't happen.

Overall the writing wasn't bad hence the three stars but there is nothing particularly extraordinary about the story either.

Val McDermid’s quote was the first thing that attracted my attention and I’m so glad it found its way onto the cover.
The best way of putting it is - I read this book greedily. It’s one of those you can’t wait to pick up again. Clever, witty and so easy to read, it’s like a well-loved poem, the rhythm of the prose already familiar.
I’m starting to think former journalists really do make the best novelists.
There’s a nice thread through the book of characters not turning out the way you initially thought and many of your assumptions get tripped up which made me enjoy it all the more, laughing out loud in parts. The children are fleshed out beautifully and touchingly and every character has their own way of using language and behaving, quite different to the others, making very vivid portraits in your mind.
The ‘dinosaur’ policeman, Marvel has some of the very best lines and a favourite moment was when he was interviewing a woman in her home -
‘Marvel thought she looked like an old Victorian painting – one of those that told a story and had an apt title. Waiting for Bad News or The Telegram.’
As anyone who’s been to an art museum will know, the paragraph this quote comes from literally jumped off the page in its descriptive perfection.
As a thriller, Belinda Bauer certainly made me care about the protagonists more than the plot which is far from the norm. A highly recommended novel from an author at the top of her game.

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

It's 1998 and the opening scene sets the tone for this gripping storyline, with 11 year old Jack and his sisters, Joy, and baby Merry waiting in their broken down car while their pregnant mum Eileen walks off to phone for help - but she never comes back. Some days later her body is found - she'd suffered a single stab wound but it was enough to cause a fatal injury.

Three years later and Jack's father has left the family home, unable to cope with his grief, giving Jack no option but to turn to crime to provide for his young sisters. He's actually quite skilled at what he does, (breaking and entering) but he only strikes when he knows the householders are away - less risk that way! He also makes himself at home while he's at it - cooks himself a meal, sleeps in the family's beds, and then trashes the house and leaves! He earns himself the nickname 'Goldilocks', and manages to evade capture every time, much to the chagrin of the local police dept.

Detectives Reynolds and Marvel are the investigating officers for both the burglaries, and the ongoing search for Eileen's killer. Reynolds and Marvel are completely different characters - Reynolds is meticulous in every aspect of his life, not one to push the boundaries. Marvel however, doesn't just push the boundaries, he demolishes them! It's a difficult working relationship but a joy to witness, with some laugh out loud dialogue from Marvel.

Jack's story is an extremely emotional one, where the loss, the grief, and the weight of responsibility that he feels, displays itself in constant outbursts of anger and destruction. However, he is about to make a surprising discovery that will once again alter the course of his young life.

This was a terrific read, with a gripping yet moving narrative. The characters were brought skilfully to life, and although Jack's loss was difficult to witness, there was lots of light relief in the form of Reynolds and Marvel. Wonderful, just wonderful!

*Thank you to Netgalley, Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, for my ARC in exchange for an honest review*

This was an unbelievably clever book. It starts out quite simply with a pregnant mother disappearing from a phone box one afternoon, but then becomes much deeper until you have no idea where it's all going to connect, but it does. Random new characters appear and you're not sure why or who they are but as the plot develops you glimpse how it all just might fit together. It's one of the best books I've read this year and I will now be looking for other work by the same author. I cannot even imagine how the Belinda came up with this concept and the fabulous characters of the Bright children, Louis and Marvel. I highly recommend it, a fabulous read that I was very sorry to finish..

This is Belinda Bauer’s 8th book but only the second one that I’ve read. I loved her first book, Blacklands, about a serial killer, told mainly from a child’s point of view, so I was looking forwarded to reading Snap. I enjoyed it but I was a bit disappointed as I read it, as it relies quite a lot on several coincidences and some of the characters were not much more than caricatures, particularly the police, Detective Inspector John Marvel, who is a bit of a maverick and Detective Sergeant Reynolds, who in contrast, is a stickler for correct procedure.

However, I think the children in this book come across as real characters. I liked the opening as eleven year old Jack and his sisters, Joy, nine years old and Merry aged three sit in their broken down car, in the sweltering sun, on the hard shoulder of the M5 motorway. Their pregnant mother didn’t have a mobile phone with her and had left them alone in the car as she walked up the road to find an emergency phone to call for help. She never returned.

Move forward three years to find Jack, now fourteen and his sisters living alone – their father couldn’t cope after his wife had been found dead by the motorway – supporting his sisters through breaking into houses to steal food and valuables. He is ‘guided’ in his criminal activities by Louis – in the same way that Fagin taught boys to pickpocket, Louis tells Jack which houses will be empty so that he can break in without fear of being caught. Then Catherine While and her husband Adam are brought into the story, when Jack breaks into their house thinking it is empty. However Catherine, pregnant, had stayed at home whilst her husband went out and is horrified to discover that she is not alone in the house. But for reasons of her own she doesn’t tell Adam or inform the police, which puts her in a dangerous situation.

The story is well paced and I was keen to find out what had happened to Jack’s mother, how he would cope with being responsible for his sisters, whether he would be caught and whether his father would return. And I was most concerned about Catherine’s safety! So overall I did enjoy it, despite the coincidences. It’s quirky and different from other crime fiction, which is refreshing.

Many thanks to Random House UK for a review copy via NetGalley.

Jack and his two younger sisters are stranded on the hard shoulder on a sweltering summers day. They are waiting for their mother to return from getting help as they have broken down. Only she doesn’t come back, she has disappeared.
Three years later Jack aged fifteen is trying desperately to look after his family their father having abandoned them and it now being known that their mother was murdered.
Amanda While is pregnant and at home in bed when she is burgled. The burglar leaves a note by her bed saying “I could have killed you”
A spate of burglaries across town become known as the Goldilocks burglaries as the perpetrator goes to sleep in the victims home in child’s bed.
This is a good, and for the most part, pacy detective story. On the whole I really engaged with the characters and the book had a sound plot. I was a little disappointed with the ending which I felt was not as strong as the rest of the book. A good read overall.

Slow starting but builds to a really well plotted read. Thanks to Netgalley the author and publisher for my review copy. Maybe a little overlong so not as pacy as it could be, but still an enthralling read. The dream sequences add nothing to the book but rather slow down the action. The characters, however, are memorable and I loved the ‘Gene Hunt’ style detective.

I am a huge fan of this author’s work in which she invariably manages to lace her crime novels with a sense of humour. Belinda Bauer above all has an exceptional ability to capture her characters on the page and none more so than when the character is a child. This is in contrast to so many other writers who often appear to use their child characters as a device and somehow make them either bland or annoying, but somehow not quite real. Not so in this novel.

Three children, eleven-year old Jack, nine-year old Joy and two-year old Merry are left on the hard shoulder of the motorway while their pregnant mother walks to the phone box to get help when their car breaks down. The sun is shining on this August day in 1998:

"It was so hot in the car that the seats smelled as though they were melting. Jack was in shorts, and every time he moved his legs they sounded like sellotape."

Yes, we’ve all had that experience in a hot car but unlike these poor children our mothers didn’t walk into the distance never to return.
The story then jumps forward three years to Catherine While’s house, her husband Adam is away, she’s heavily pregnant and thinks she can hear someone in the house.

"When you lived alone, and you heard a noise in the night, you didn’t cower under the bedclothes and wait for your fate to saunter up the stairs and down the hallway. When you lived alone, you got up and grabbed the torch, the bat, the hairspray and you sneaked downstairs to confront… The dishwasher."

This time though, it wasn’t the dishwasher.

When Catherine returns to bed, there is a knife and a note by the side of her bed, that wasn’t there before.

The reader follows Jack’s struggle following his mother’s disappearance as well as observing what Catherine does following the intruder to her house, and not all of her actions are wise ones!

And then we have a Detective Inspector John Marvel who has been sent to Somerset away from his beloved London following a transgression and he’s assigned to the Goldilocks case; a burglar who breaks into people’s houses and sleeps in their beds before making off with their belongings. His team consists of DC Parrott and DS Reynolds and three make a hilarious trio as they try to catch their man.

So lots going on and yet all so enticing. There wasn’t a page that didn’t delight me with vignettes of observation that really hit the mark:

The star of this show though is Jack, his resilience alone is amazing, and it is precisely because we see the cracks in his armour that I couldn't help but fall in love with him.

A read that I have to admit is a tad quirky for a crime novel, a book that will truly entertain you while the darkness of murder lurks. It is so refreshing to read something that is differs in style within this, my favourite genre.

I'm normally a big fan of Belinda Bauer and leapt at the chance to read this ahead of publication. As you'd expect from this author, it's a real page-turner - but I'm afraid I found myself really disappointed with this one. So many coincidences are required to make the plot work that it really is beyond belief. I don't want to include any plot spoilers, but the two main policemen are at opposite ends of particular stereotypes - but seem to be just the sum of the stereotypes, rather than nuanced characters you can believe in. And - possible plot spoiler here - there's no sense that the mother's murderer has ever killed before - but really? In that case, why does he kill Jack's mother? It seems like he just randomly picked her up, but just so happened to have a very particular murder weapon about his person. The only character in the book who really does seem like a well-rounded and developed character is Jack (and, to a lesser extent, Catherine) but all in all, if I did give a copy of this to someone, I would only do so with the warning that it required a major suspension of disbelief. I'm surprised to see this has so many positive reviews on Amazon - I'm afraid I'm in agreement with the more negative reviewers who are equally mystified by the massive holes in the plot.

I enjoyed this rollercoaster of a book. Sentimental in parts and gripping in others A perfect mix for a thriller. I have never read this author but will be on the lookout for her other works and look forward to her next novel. I thank Netgalley and the publisher for the chance to review this book.

As I started to read this book I thought "What's going on?", and was somewhat confused . However, I was soon hooked and couldn't put it down. Jack, aged 10, and his two younger sisters are left in their broken down car on the M5 whilst their heavily pregnant mother walks off to find a roadside telephone and call for help. After waiting for what seems an endless time, Jack decides they must get out of the hot vehicle and go to meet her. Carrying young Merry and with Joy in tow they eventually reach the phone only to find it dangling towards the ground and no sign of their mum. We jump ahead about three years and find Jack and the girls living together in their home and trying to convince neighbours that their absence Dad is working away, leaves home very early in the morning and returns very late at night - but where is Dad? Jack turns to a life of crime - petty and not so petty burglary, and suffers from extremely vivid dreams relating to Mum's murder, All the time he is searching for the person who killed her - will he be successful in finding said villain??

Jack was 11 when the family car broke down on the motorway and his mother left him and his 2 sisters in the car to use the emergency phone. After waiting an hour they decide to walk meet her, which is when they discover the emergency phone dangling by the roadside, their mother nowhere to be seen.

A few years later, unable to take anymore, their father walks out on them, leaving a 14 year old Jack to take charge over his younger sisters and stop the outside world from getting involved, not that anyone ever has before.

Running parallel to Jack's story, we also have Catherine While. Wife to Adam While and mum-to-be, Catherine is left fearing for her life when her house is broken into and a knife is left for her to find. Along with a note that terrifyingly says "I could have killed you". How are these 2 stories linked? Is the same person who hurt Jack's mum looking for a new victim?

Well you will have to read to find out, no spoilers here.

This book is fast paced, action packed and full of twists and turns. Most of the characters are likeable, including the grumpy DCI Marvel. I really warmed to Jack throughout the book and empathised with the position he finds himself in. Just a child himself, he is forced into a parental role, taking care of his younger siblings, providing for them the best way he knows how. He doesn't always make the right decision but his heart is in the right place.

What really got to me was how before that day on the motorway, Jack was part of a normal family that could probably never have imagined their lives would change so drastically over the next few years. How overnight 1 event can take the world as you know it and spin it on its axis until it is unrecognisable as your own life.

I couldn't put this book down and read it over just a couple of days. It's the type of book that really pulls you into its world and keeps you guessing, there were a few twists that I didn't see coming. The last part does become a little far fetched but as a fiction novel how realistic does it need to be?

I don't know if I have been living under a rock but I actually hadn't heard of Belinda Baur before or read any of her books despite being a huge fan of this genre. I will definitely be seeking out some more of her books in the future because if this story is anything to go by I will love them.
Final scores
As a fan of anything mysterious/crime related I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it. It is a book full of secrets but at its heart it is a sad story about a young boy who has lost his mum.

Belinda Bauer's books are not to be missed. They set new standards in inventiveness, research and dark criminality. "Snap" is no different and the young characters in the storyline grab your attention and sympathy. You just want to keep reading to the very last page (tears at the heartstrings) and then impatiently wait for her next book..

11 year old Jack's mother breaks down and asks him and his sisters to wait in the car while she goes to call for help. They never see her again. This description of the children waiting in the car on a hot summer day, their waiting and waiting for their mother to return and slowly coming to realise that she isn't, is extremely well crafted and hooks you to the novel. from the outset.

Three years later, their father has gone and Jack is looking after the house and his sisters alone with the only means he has. A chance find leads him to discover clues that will eventually reveal the story about what had happened to his mother three years before.

The story of Jack's journey of discovery is a real page turner and makes an excellent read with a good cast of characters.

This story gathered momentum nicely tho I was not convinced that a pregnant woman would not call the police when alone in her house, burgled and left with such a terrifying message, baby brain or no baby brain! Would also liked to have known a little more about the finding
of Jack’s Homeless father! When and how? However, thoroughly enjoyed the banter between the belligerent, misogynistic Marvel and the intense and serious Reynolds! These two make a very believable partnership which could go far! I also liked the fact that Marvel proved to have a heart and let Jack go. The ending reached its climax with an intensity that had me racing to get there! On the whole much enjoyed!

11-year-old Jack and his two younger sisters wait in their pregnant mother's broken-down car while she goes to find an emergency roadside phone to call for assistance. Jack and his sisters set off to find her when she doesn't return. But that hot summer's day is the last they'll see her alive. Their lives are changed forever.

Abandoned by their father, Jack takes charge. He turns to petty crime to support the family and prevent them being discovered by Social Services. One night he quietly breaks into the home of Catherine and leaves a knife with a note beside her bed which reads, 'I could have killed you'. But instead of going to the police, Catherine destroys the note and tries to forget about it. Why doesn't she want the police involved? Jack believes their lives are connected through the murder of his mother and he's determined justice will be served.

Reading Snap brought back vivid memories of a 1988 real-life unsolved murder. A heavily pregnant British woman's car breaks down on the M50 motorway. While making a call for assistance from an emergency roadside phone, she's abducted and stabbed to death. Her 11-year-old sister and one-year-old baby wait inside the car. No one stops to help. The sister and baby are eventually picked up by the police walking along the motorway's hard-shoulder. Startling similarities between the book and this murder lead me to assume it was likely the basis for the novel.

There the similarities end. The book tells of Jack's unwavering search for his mother's killer and the ramifications her murder has upon the family. The story is well-plotted and progresses at a good pace. However, I struggled with the writing style. I felt it was a little too lighthearted when I wanted it to be a sobering crime novel. It prevented me from properly connecting with the book. Several characters were introduced but didn't 'go' anywhere - the Bridge family for example. They fizzled out and it was disappointing. Whilst I enjoyed the book, I felt certain aspects didn't quite hit the mark to elevate it to the next level.

* I received an Advance Reader Copy. My thanks to Belinda Bauer, NetGalley and Transworld Digital.

Really gripping. Loved the sentiment, grit and reality of the characters. Would definitely recommend.