What is Blacklands about?

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.

Blacklands is Bauer's debut, and it announced a writer with real nerve. The Exmoor setting — bleak, beautiful, full of the moor that hides its secrets — is rendered physically without being overwrought. The pacing is lean; the novel is short and does not overstay its welcome. Bauer avoids the obvious move of making Avery a Lecter-style theatrical monster. He is menacing precisely because he is plausible, his manipulation recognizable as a version of things people do to each other in ordinary life.

This is not a comfortable read. Bauer puts a child in genuine danger and does not fully protect the reader from the implications. But it is one of the most assured debut crime novels of the last two decades, and it won the CWA Gold Dagger deservedly. Readers who like psychologically complex crime fiction and can tolerate the premise will find this hard to put down. Those uncomfortable with child peril should know what they're getting into.