Belinda Bauer - Snap

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Nothing special

I have quite enjoyed some of Belinda Bauer’s previous books and in the end I found Snap a readable, if pretty implausible, thriller, but it’s nothing that special.

The first 100 pages are, frankly, rather dull and often plain poor. Early on, there is an event which would make anyone – absolutely anyone – dial 999 immediately, but it is important for the plot that the person involved tells no-one...so she doesn’t, and the endless mental absurdities given to justify this just made me bored and rather cross. Bauer’s portraits of her main characters are rather crudely painted and the two male police officers especially are absurd caricatures of different aspects of male smugness and self-regard – with, of course, a far more human, intelligent and grounded female junior officer whom they despise, just to make sure we grasp the point. I found the psychology of some of her other characters pretty iffy, too, and the repeated dream sequences were unconvincing and very irritating.

Bauer’s writing is quite often rather overblown in the clichéd manner of so many “Gripping Psychological Thrillers” so we get a lot of this kind of stuff:

“Catherine turned toward the oven and gaped.

The oven was open, and the cake tin lay upside down on the tiled floor.

Oozing batter.”

This kind of repeated, unsubtle hammering at the reader with one-sentence (or one-clause) paragraphs did get me down in the end and I almost gave up. However, there is a development around page 130 which was quite interesting and by page 200 it does become quite an intriguing story. It’s an easy read which I did want to finish, but there is so much gaping implausibility, coupled with some highly unlikely and sentimental character shifts that it didn’t add up to much more than that for me.

I’m very pleased to see a crime novel on the Booker Long List. There have been some very fine crime-driven novels in recent years with real psychological and social depth, which would have been very worthy Booker contenders: several of Susan Hill’s Serrailler series, G.D. Abson’s Motherland, Joe Ide’s IQ spring to mind, among others. However, Snap isn’t in that league; it’s a readable but not very remarkable thriller which I can recommend as an undemanding read once you’ve waded through the first 120 pages or so, but it’s no more than that.