Finders Keepers [Hardcover]

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.

I don't normally read crime/detective thrillers so I can't say how this compares to the rest of the genre, but I found it to be a good read. Good enough to make me wonder if maybe I have been missing out by ignoring the genre.

The perspective of the book keeps changing so you get inside the heads of various police officers, victims and other adults and children, including a couple with learning disabilities. Having a little knowledge of the subject second-hand I thought the treatment of the children with learning difficulties was entirely believable and sympathetic.

If the balance of the book was tilted more towards the situation of the kidnap victims and the circumstances of their captivity and less towards the police procedures, this would be a very Richard Laymon-esque book. The crime itself has that macabre touch.

Basically I enjoyed the book enough that I don't want to say much more about it in case of spoilers.