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What it argues
Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb lives in the shadow of an unresolved disappearance. His uncle Billy went missing as a child, taken by a serial killer who buried his victims on Exmoor and was later convicted without ever disclosing where all the bodies are. Steven's grandmother has never recovered. The grief that should have passed years ago still runs through the household like a slow leak — his mother is depressed, his brother is angry, nobody talks about it directly. Steven decides that if he can find Billy's body and give his grandmother a grave to mourn, the family might finally begin to heal.
To find the body, Steven does something that should not work but does: he writes a letter to the killer, Arnold Avery, in prison. Avery writes back. And so begins a correspondence that Bauer handles with extraordinary skill, because Avery is intelligent, charming, methodical about manipulation, and genuinely dangerous even from a prison cell — and Steven is a child who wants something badly enough to keep the game going. The two form a deeply asymmetric relationship that Bauer never lets tip into sentimentality or into easy predator-victim drama.
What it gets right
- 1.
The generational transmission of grief is the novel's real subject — Steven's search is not just for a body but for a way to unstick a family trapped in the past.
- 2.
Avery is frightening because he is recognizably human — his manipulation operates through charm and logic, not theatrical villainy.
- 3.
Steven is a fully realized child, not a precocious mini-adult — his decisions feel plausible for a twelve-year-old who loves his grandmother.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Belinda Bauer is a British crime novelist who grew up in England and South Africa. Blacklands, her debut novel published in 2009, won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger and established her reputation as one of the most daring voices in British crime fiction. Her novels are known for unexpected perspectives, dark premises, and a refusal to soften the realities of violence and grief. She has also won the CWA Gold Dagger for Rubbernecker. Bauer lives in Wales and continues to write fiction that challenges genre conventions.
