The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio
The children steal the show in Belinda Bauer's unnerving suspense novel, Snap.
Publishers Weekly
05/14/2018
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)
From the Publisher
Praise for Snap:
Winner of the UK National Book Award for Crime Fiction
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018
“With her deeply quirky take, Belinda Bauer is totally unlike contemporaries, and all her crime novels have a very distinct identity. Readers never know what to expect with each new novel, except that it will be highly accomplished.”—Financial Times (UK)
“The children steal the show in Belinda Bauer’s unnerving suspense novel.”—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times
“Bauer deftly interweaves a West Country cold-case murder, a teenage master burglar, some ill-assorted coppers and a pregnant wife, knowing exactly when the turn the dial to humor, pathos or something darker. Intelligent entertainment that keeps you guessing.”—Sunday Times Crime Club (UK)
“The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time.”—Val McDermid, author of Insidious Intent
“[A] spine-chilling, tension-packed gripper.”—Woman & Home (UK)
“Bauer secures her place as a star in the British psychological-suspense firmament with this tightly written tale . . . Readers who miss Ruth Rendell are sure to become fast Bauer fans.”—Booklist (starred review)
“How in the world did Belinda Bauer create this 14-year-old Robin Hood of a cat burglar who stole my heart? I absolutely loved this utterly satisfying read. My ‘gotta know’ knotted with overwhelming sympathy for the victimized and Snap gripped me to the last page.” —Randy Susan Meyers, bestselling author of The Widow of Wall Street
“Snap is the best kind of crime novel—it gives you chills, it makes you think, and it touches your heart. I loved it!”—Sarah Pinborough, author of Behind Her Eyes
“Original, pacy and thoroughly entertaining . . . A cracking read.”—Clare Mackintosh, author of I See You
“Is there a current writer in the genre who can be guaranteed never to repeat themselves—and who comes up with an original premise for each new book? . . . It is the highly individual Belinda Bauer. Snap, her latest novel, continues this pleasing trajectory . . . There are echoes of earlier novels here: Julian Gloag’s Our Mother’s House and Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, but Bauer (as ever) is very much her own woman, and produces something that exerts a considerable grip on the reader.”—Crime Time (UK)
SEPTEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
As a mystery, SNAP stretches credulity. But Andrew Wincott’s narration is steadying, even as the story shifts under foot. Jack Bright, who is only 14, has been left to raise his siblings as best he can—through petty theft—after his mother’s murder. In the midst of a bill-paying burglary, Jack discovers a possible clue to that murder. He has to decide whether to bring the law down on himself in order to get justice. Wincott’s take on Jack is dead on, as is his rendering of Jack’s two younger sisters. Wincott needs to interest us in these children, given the hapless assortment of adults surrounding them—all equally well rendered but by no means as sympathetic. K.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-04-16
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.
