As we approach Belinda Bauer’s TV Book Club appearance on More4 this Sunday evening, it seems that television viewers aren’t the only ones setting their sites on the Transworld crime debut of 2010, BLACKLANDS.
Henry Sutton of the DAILY MIRROR said:
“Belinda Bauer has shifted the boundaries of what makes a truly gripping, terrifying thriller. Imagine Thomas Harris crossed with Kate Atkinson and you still won’t be close. Aside from a ridiculously assured prose style, and a superbly well-crafted plot, what Bauer does is to combine real and chilling psychological insight with top-notch, absolutely terrifying suspense… Right from the start you know you are reading something both new and with real guts… Bauer brilliantly brings to life both Avery’s deranged and unravelling mind, and Steven’s stoical yet naïve rational. The denouement, on a foggy Exmoor, will leave you breathless.”
Laura Wilson of THE GUARDIAN believes:
“This astonishingly assured debut, from journalist and screenwriter Belinda Bauer, for once lives up to the hype… Told in lucid, uncluttered prose, the description of the effect of this correspondence on both parties is genuinely chilling… With little in the way of graphic detail – Bauer is too good a writer to jerk us into the past with clumsy italicised flashbacks – Blacklands is a world away from the ‘torture porn’ school of crime fiction, and a hundred times more effective in terms of visceral impact….. Steven… is impeccably, even heartbreakingly, well-imagined… As well as detailing the frustrating powerlessness of childhood, Bauer also paints a vivid portrait of the rupturing effect of a child’s murder upon a family, with its aftermath of fractured, stunted people with only one reference point in their lives… a psychological tour-de-force about the cruelty of hope and, ultimately, the triumph of innocence.”
SHOTS MAG claimed:
“It is hard to know where to start praising this spare, tense, humane novel . . . This is not just an excellent first novel – so good it will surely be at least short-listed for the CWA Debut Dagger – but an excellent novel full stop. Read it, and start what I hope will be a glittering career for Belinda Bauer.”
You can catch Belinda on The TV Book Club on More4 this Sunday 24th January at 7.30pm, and again on Channel 4 on Monday 25th January at 12.05pm.
BLACKLANDS by Belinda Bauer is published by Corgi, priced £7.99 - to purchase yours now, CLICK HERE!
