Blacklands is a sensational crime fiction debut novel which won the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger Award in 2010. I usually try to know as little as possible about the books I review when I start to read them, but in this case it was different. I had already read a lot about Blacklands and Belinda Bauer when I began, and most of it was very, very positive. So naturally I had high expectations at the outset.
In the beginning, I was a bit underwhelmed. I felt that Belinda Bauer’s writing style was somewhat simplistic. The story of the eleven year old Steven Lamb was interesting: Both the poor living conditions, his difficult life, and his futile attempts to find the body of his missing uncle Billy Peters by digging in the moors of Exmoor, was well written and OK to read, but not much more. His grandmother was still waiting for her missing son to return home – after eighteen years! – and was still looking out of the windows for him, while Steven was convinced that he had been killed by the now imprisoned pedophile mass murderer Arnold Avery. Perhaps Steven wanted to find his body to put his grandmother’s mind to rest, or perhaps it was because he wanted to have all her attention, including the part of it she “wasted” by waiting for Billy? Who knows? And who cares, I thought. Interesting, but not marvelous or exceptional.
“Exmoor dripped with dirty bracken, rough, colorless grass, prickly gorse, and last year’s heather, so black it looked as if wet fire had swept across the landscape, taking the trees with it and leaving the moor cold and exposed to face the winter unprotected. Drizzle dissolved the close horizons and blurred heaven and earth into a grey cocoon around the only visible landmark – a twelve year old boy in slick black waterproof trousers but no hat, alone with a spade.”
As you can see, it is well written. But there are so many well written and somewhat interesting books!
But then something happened. Belinda Bauer introduced an exciting new element in the story. The increasingly frustrated Steven decides to write a letter to the mass murderer. He wants Avery to tell him where Billy’s body is buried!
But even after confessing to and being convicted for murdering multiple children, Avery refused to admit to killing Billy or where the body was buried. So how can Steven make him tell?
The correspondence between the innocent but very smart eleven year old Steven and the highly intelligent, very dangerous and extremely crafty mass murderer and manipulator Avery is masterful. Its introduction lifted the story in Backlands and transformed it in a very small number of pages from a sorry tale of longing and misery to an extremely well plotted, cunning and very intriguing crime fiction novel. A series of short, more or less cryptic messages, each totally innocent in form and containing nothing that even aroused the suspicion of the sensors of Avery’s prison, yet full of meaning and extremely pointed for sender and receiver.
After the introduction of the chilling correspondence, I could hardly put the book away. I raced through the pages. Even now, two weeks after I finished it, I rethink it and marvel at the cleverness of the twists Belinda Bauer introduced in this fascinating and compelling tale. Blacklands is a brilliant example of solid psychological crime fiction, and the fact that it is Bauer’s debut novel makes it all the more impressive a read. It’s a spare, finely drawn, exquisite thriller. To say that I recommend it seems to be not nearly enough in this case: To be fair to this amazing book I have to say that if you only plan to read one book this year, I urge you to consider Blacklands!
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