276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Snap: The Sunday Times Bestseller

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

The hairless saviour, fence, thief and liar, Louis Bridge proves to be an invaluable help to the young Jack, as Jack finds himself living on the edges of society, surviving and providing for his family by acquiring the skills of a cat burglar. SNAP is a multi-layered, cleverly plotted crime novel with a varied group of unusual and unpredictable character types.

Jack ends up catering and becoming a Carer of his young siblings the only way he learns how to since his dad couldn’t hack things and went. The characters are simply amazing, unique, some likeable, some flawed but all so vivid in their descriptions they could be standing right in front of you and although I don't like to imagine the police involved in the story as being your average and typical criminal investigators, they did make for interesting reading and made the story so much more intriguing. Snap illustrates that life isn’t necessarily straightforward and that morality can have very blurred edges. She was last seen over an hour before, walking away on the shoulder of the road towards a payphone to get help. Everything he did for his family, his internal conflict knowing what he was doing was wrong combined with a need to care for his sisters was so intense.

I liked the setting as well; for some reason crime novels set in small town England have a vibe that really works for me and this was no exception.

It appears to the reader from the start that there are three very different stories being told that are completely unrelated - the murder of a pregnant mother, a sinister Intruder frightening a young woman at night and a sneaky burglar sleeping in kids beds - but before long they very cleverly start to weave together and escalate in a nail biting conclusion that will have you gripped to the pages until the exciting end. Now, we focus on British English but once the children reach the upper-intermediate level we introduce them to American and Australian English. They walked up the hard shoulder on the motorway on a blazing hot day for miles, and not one single car stopped, this little girl carrying a baby. It is now 3 years later and Jack, while burglarizing a house he thought was vacant, discovers a knife exactly like the one used to murder his mother. Three years later, Jack is supporting himself and his sisters by breaking into people’s homes and stealing things, including healthy food to feed the family.

Most characters are not given the space to develop any complexity; they are like characters in a Carry On film with their individual tic or prominent trait, but with nothing behind it. I would say if you were looking for a fast-paced/thrilling psychological thriller then you might have been slightly disappointed. In fact, she says, she didn’t even realise that her 2010 debut, Blacklands – the story of a boy who enters into a dangerous correspondence with the imprisoned paedophile serial killer believed to have murdered his uncle – was a thriller at all. It wasn’t until a lunch to sign a contract with her publisher, Transworld, that Bauer learned she was all set for a career as a crime novelist.

And I’m frustrated that the Booker wasted an opportunity to expand literary readers’ horizons on this rather pointless and ill-constructed novel. It takes a while for the different threads in this book to come together, to weave their tapestry into the bigger picture, but it is a picture worth waiting for.Bauer explores a young boy’s reaction both to the trauma and to the responsibility placed on his shoulders. Jack Bright's eyes were narrow as a smoker's and pale grey, as if all the colour had been cried out of them. I doubt it will generate much positive opinion, which is so sad because it is nice to see some variety on the list. The motivations of one key character (Catherine) are also unbelievable and the whole thing is slightly over-constructed, but that's not even what bothers me.

This book is on the Man Booker long list so I thought I’d give it a go, especially since it created a bit of controversy, being, I believe, the first crime thriller to ever make the Man Book finalist. In a sea of novels claiming to provide "a twist so shocking you won't see it coming", she quietly places a superior story that doesn't rely on gimmicks or tag lines in front of us and patiently waits with neatly folded hands until we're through reading.It starts off a little slow and I had no idea where things were going, but Jack’s character kept me reading. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Grove Atlantic via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of Snap by Belinda Bauer for review.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment