Snap: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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I was ready and willing to be wowed by Snap, the crime novel supposedly innovative and subversive enough to make it onto this year’s Man Booker longlist. It just didn’t add anything to the story except for a VERY flimsy moment toward the end where we’re informed by a ham-fisted plot point that their proximity actually did matter!

Goldilocks is happy with firm, soft, or ‘just-right’ beds for a little snooze while stealing the goods from people’s homes. I wanted to do so many other things, I wanted to tell so many other stories, and then slowly it was revealed to me that I can tell any story I want in the crime genre,” she says. I could feel his emotions through the pages I was howling with laughter at the chapter introducing DCI Marvel.

It’s a blisteringly hot summer’s day Eileen Bright’s car breaks down on the highway leaving her and her three children stranded. This reader, at least, was pleased to go along with the journey even when things got a bit preposterous.

When I visited Liverpool, I was so desperate, I couldn’t understand a thing, I thought I was useless.Fear of being picked up by social services has led Jack to keep a well manicured lawn and washed windows. The hairless saviour, fence, thief and liar, Louis Bridge proves to be an invaluable help to the young Jack, as Jack finds himself living on the edges of society, surviving and providing for his family by acquiring the skills of a cat burglar.

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! The sensitivity in how this loss was described added to the authenticity and sets it apart from other thrillers. Jack's story was truly an emotional one filled with anger, grief and his overwhelming sense of responsibility for his siblings. So having to fend for themselves, Jack, who’s exceptionally resourceful, is taught the art of burglary and ends up being quite adept at breaking and entering, stealing food for family survival.

This novel by Belinda Bauer reminds me of why I started reading thrillers just about three years ago. Another recurring theme that haunts Jack is that no-one stopped to see what was the matter, no-one wanted to get involved. A week after her birthday she had bundled it up with all her others and put them in a drawer in the spare room. Bauer had been, despite initial misgivings, thoroughly assimilated into the crime-writing community. Three years later, Catherine, a young pregnant woman, wakes to find a knife laying alongside her in her bedroom.