Finders Keepers [Paperback]

DO read Blacklands and Darkside before reading this. Then it will all make sense and you'll get the very best out of what is an exciting trilogy.
The charactorisation is excellent. There is plenty of humour in there too, usually just when you need a break from the heaviness of the story as it unfolds.
The children and young people are believable and well written, in particular the ones with disability. A very sympathetic depiction as well as giving them star space and credit for their intelligence.
As with the last two books, this has a thrilling last phase, making it impossible to put down.
I'm not sure if Belinda Bauer is done with the village of Shipcott and its residents now, it might be as well to leave it there, though if another book followed, I'd just have to buy it.
What ever Bauer writes next, I'll be up for it.

From the start this is high tension. Children are being kidnapped from parked cars where thy've been left alone and untended. To begin with there's even an uneasy nearly comic feel to the kidnappings, some seen in their oddities from the child's point of view, and with some grim comments from the kidnapper, who leaves notes accusing that children who've been abandoned to chance are children who aren't loved. The scene broadens, to take in their parents, from every social class, and to include the central figures from Belinda Bauer's first and second novels. From Blacklands is Steven Lamb, who'd played cat and mouse as a twelve-year old with the child killer who'd murdered his Uncle Billy. From Dark Side is Jonas Holly, the village policeman whose dying wife was slaughtered by a killer who'd almost succeeded in dismembering Jonas too. Steven is seventeen now, and beginning to fall in love with a new girl at his school. Jonas is still one of the walking wounded, but has been returned to work by a Counsellor who's herself seriously in need of help.

As the book continues, the cast expands. There's focus on Reynolds, the Inspector who's over-preoccupied with his hair transplant, and on Elizabeth Rice, the kindly Sergeant who's side-lined for not admiring Reynolds as much as he'd wish. People on the side-lines matter, and as more children are kidnapped, more families and acquaintances are touched by the crimes, and each one comes alive, sometimes briefly in a cameo (like the kindly driver of the school bus who suffers from a troublesome bladder), and sometimes more extensively, as do Steven's family, his gran, his mother, and his little brother Davey. It becomes a world crowded with life, and with the different and varied perceptions of an increasing cast. Kids and teenagers are especially vital, whether squabbling in the school playground or inventing games to dispel boredom, and there's a remarkable sequence which tracks from one to another of a small band of mentally disabled children on a bus-trip to a country fair.

In short, with this book Belinda Bauer extends her range, and wrapped up with a thriller she delivers a real contemporary novel, teeming with the diversity that is Britain today, some of it viewed head on, some caught in sharp focus but as if in passing. "A house for Free People" was the ideal novel according to Iris Murdoch, and while the thriller plot surges on, Belinda Bauer presents variety rich enough so to keep open the question who is free from what's happening, and who is about to be caught up in the ongoing horror.

Who the kidnapper is and why the kidnaps are taking place is made plain about three fifths through the book, but this only amplifies the tension. As it becomes evident why the kidnaps are happening, and what is the fate of the kidnapper's victims, the question of consequences becomes all the more terrible and pressing, and the plot takes new and more disturbing turns. For some readers the motivation driving the kidnapper has seemed bizarre and extraordinary; it is, in its way, indeed it has to be so because of the deeds it provokes. But it didn't strike me as either impossible or as faulty composition, not least because it's put before us with such sustained and piercing clarity. And it's because it lies outside the grasp and comprehension of the police and the villagers (and of the journalists who swoop, preying vicariously on the families) that the tension mounts even more. Can there be a resolution to a drive that's at the edge of the horizon of everyday understanding? Her previous books had faced the protagonists with menace that was to them almost incomprehensible, first of all Steven facing the child-killer he imagined he could out-smart, then Jonas facing the potential killer of his wife. Here Belinda Bauer builds up a much fuller world and then confronts it with a threat that comes from regions at once more or less of its own making and that's also disturbingly beyond its ken.

The chilling final scenes are, as others have remarked, sudden and speedy, but again this strikes me as no fault. This is not a book that has easy explanations to offer. Rather, it widens perception, stretching the vision as the cast multiplies and enlarges, and the ultimate disturbance is in the starlingness of a world that is always vivid but not readily amenable to tidiness or control.

Does it matter whether you've read Belinda Bauer's earlier novels, or not? I had read and liked them very much, and this one makes me want to go back and reread. But there are no spoilers here, and to me it seems you neither lose nor gain wherever you start. Their past as survivors of grim ordeals has given Steven and Jonas strengths beyond the ordinary, but from this each has weaknesses and vulnerabilities too; they may have extra capacities because each has already faced awfulness, but that also means each is hyper-aware what it is to be wounded and hurt. When the past is invoked, as it is from time to time, the larger point is that it explains nothing, and what is now confronting their world is new, as harsh and perplexing for toughened survivors as it is for those who are more innocent; shock and pain and trouble are distressing regardless of whether or not you've been there before.

The enlargements Belinda Bauer is bringing to the thriller are to an extent reminiscent of Minette Walters, who progressed from small closed worlds to the magnificent range of an entire sink estate with Acid Row. Reminiscent too of Ruth Rendell, who began all those years ago with lifting the stones to expose the slime beneath village or suburban life, and gradually moved to bigger and broader encounters with city life, taking in on her democratic way rich and poor, young and old. There is here as well an almost fairy-tale element propelling the plot, with the grimness of the best fairy tales lurking too. Above all, there's range and scope - vignettes of grief when the focus is on Jonas, and something near to a Romeo and Juliet delight in Steven's discovery of teenage love. And then every so often there's a throw-away phrase or image that's sparklingly fresh and in itself poetic. This is a seriously good writer developing in scale and feeling from an already excellent beginning, a wonder in itself, and whetting the appetite for her next brilliant inventions.

Set in Exmoor, plucky little Jess Took is kidnapped from her father's vehicle while he is off managing the local hunt. Before you can say "who took Took?" another little boy is plucked from his parents' car. In both scenes the only evidence is a post-it note saying "you don't love her" or him. On the case is DI Reynolds who is initially more concerned with how his new hair transplant is taking until the crimes escalate to a full scale serial abduction case.

This is the third book of Bauer's to feature young Stephen and local bobby, Jonas Holly. Poor Stephen has already been through a lot in his life as readers of the first two books will be well aware. Technically, it is quite possible to read this book as a stand alone, but I wouldn't advise it and in particular I wouldn't advise the reading pattern that I adopted which, for the first quarter of the book in particular, left me mindful of school days where I'd skived a particularly important lesson only to find that the subsequent lesson referred back repeatedly to the one I'd missed. Let me explain. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Bauer's first book, "Blacklands" but somehow her second, "Dark Side" remains sitting on my Amazon wish list. Stupidly, I jumped at the chance to read her latest and thereby missing out on the second adventure.

Thus, I acknowledge that my partial reservations about this book in comparison with "Blacklands" are at least in part my own fault. One of the things that makes Bauer's books so interesting and real is that her characters are affected by the traumatic events of their past. It's blissfully free of the ridiculous conceit in places like "Midsummer" where the police seem to have no notion that their rural idle boasts the highest crime rate in the world. No. Bauer's characters are damaged by events and in particular both Stephen and even more so, Jonas Holly who we are told here suffered hugely in the second novel in the series.

The downside to this is that to explain the mental state of Jonas in particular we have to get a lot of back story that I assume is in the second book. Almost exactly a quarter of the way through the book, DI Reynolds thought my own concerns when Bauer writes of him that "It was the memory of his previous failure on Exmoor that haunted him as much as this new one unfolding". Quite so. Once we get drawn into the present case, the book again soars into Bauer's darkly twisted mind. In particular there are a couple of short extracts told in the first person from the kidnapper that are suddenly thrown to the reader that are genuinely creepy. Although once we know who the kidnapper is, the circumstances are hardly less dark.

Bauer creates real suspense and provides a number of plausible characters, and while the events are horrific, she manages to make them hellishly real. I know some readers don't like crime novels where children are the victims, and if this sounds like you, then this is probably not the book for you. But for the rest of us, providing you are not as stupid as I am and don't read only books one and three, then I'd highly recommend this series. It's certainly worth starting at the beginning though because, while this does work as a stand alone book, it reveals a lot about what happened in the previous books and it would be a great shame to ruin the tension that her books generate by knowing some of the outcomes. And you are almost certainly going to want to read more of her works. She probably hasn't done much for the holiday trade in Exmoor though.