Reviews

• Blacklands

  This book is very very good! My heart was pounding as the book reached its climax.

• An intelligent crime thriller that seeps with atmosphere.

  Steven is a 12-year-old boy who spends his spare time digging up on the moors looking for the body of his Uncle Billy, murdered as a child, to try and appease the grief of his Nana and heal his family from the tragedy. Unsuccessful in his search, he decides to contact Arnold Avery, the creepy serial killer convicted of his Uncle’s murder. So begins a deftly written tale of a desperate boy innocently placing himself in the hands of a manipulative killer. This is the first novel by Belinda Bauer in the Exmoor Trilogy, and the first time I have read her work. Being a lover of crime thrillers that step outside of the run of the mill formulaic police procedural, I was not disappointed. Bauer writes in a surprisingly tender way about chilling situations and this style serves to make you care about her characters and invest in them emotionally. The book starts slowly, but she paints a vividly atmospheric setting, before plunging the reader into a tense power struggle between an achingly vulnerable boy and a paedophilic killer serving life imprisonment who is anything but rehabilitated. Once the game begins, it is impossible to put this book down. You watch in horror as Steven becomes more and more enmeshed in his pitiful mission to extract the whereabouts of his Uncle’s body from Avery, who has his own agenda at play. I read this book voraciously over two days. The story clung to me and my concern for Steven pulled me back in to find out what happened when I really didn’t have the time to be reading. Bauer provides us with an accomplished and memorable debut, and although she is using a real-life storyline known to readers of an age to remember the Moors Murderers, she provides a different approach to that source material by focusing on the forgotten victims, those left behind. This book makes me want to read all of her subsequent novels, and gives me that delicious and often rare feeling of finding another great writer to follow.

• Literate and terrifying.

  Another excellent thriller from this author. It is literate and scary. Her characters are richly drawn and the way in which she gets inside the serial killer's head is terrifying. Highly recommended.

• Great read

  The first of this authors books I have read, and was suitably impressed. This chilling suspenseful story keeps the pages turning. It's storyline is different from other crime novels I have read - very well crafted and well written. Lots of little twists and turns throughout, and we cant help barrack for our hero, a 12 year old boy, searching for some recognition and stability, starts communicating with an incarcerated serial killer, to help him solve a family murder which he feels once solved will heal his family. Definitely recommend, and will source other books by this author.

• I normally read police-type procedurals. I found this author ...

  I normally read police-type procedurals. I found this author via one of Amazons emails with suggested books. It is a psychological thriller, and despite the previous reader giving it only three stars because of its admittedly difficult subject matter, I would give it five stars because of the author's slightly unnerving ability to inhabit both the child and adult viewpoints in a sustained way. I was stunned by her writing. It is unnerving because she seamlessly passes from one viewpoint to the other, all the while maintain a sort of off-kilter sense of absolute suspense. I have only read one other psychological thriller which matched it. "The Other" by Thomas Tryon. It may be a bit dated now, but it really is not. The themes are universal. and he was at the forefront of this sort of writing back in the day . Being so young at that time, I was shocked by it and I had a similar reaction now when reading Belinda Bauer's novel. She thoroughly deserves the prizes and accolades she has won. She has tackled a hard subject head on, and believe me you won't be able to put it down

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