The Thriller That Forgot to Be a Thriller (In a Good Way)

A boy, a camera, and a murder nobody wants to solve properly

Here’s the setup. Fourteen year old Jack Bright is a paperboy in a small English town, and he’s also, unofficially, a photographer of crime scenes. He’s got a camera and a habit of turning up where he shouldn’t, and one day he photographs a stopped car with two dead women inside, one of them the actual person who was supposed to be minding him and his sisters while their mother recovers from a breakdown. The case goes cold. The police move on. Jack does not.

What Bauer does that I didn’t expect is make this barely about the murders for long stretches. Jack’s mother is unraveling in a way that’s never fully explained to him or to me for a good chunk of the book, and his younger sisters are basically depending on a traumatized boy with a camera to keep the household from falling apart. There’s a police detective, Marvel, who is exactly as charmless as his name suggests, chasing the case with none of the warmth you’d expect from a lead investigator, and that’s the point. The people who are supposed to protect Jack keep failing to, in ways big and small, and the mystery of who killed those two women in the car becomes almost secondary to the mystery of whether this kid is going to be okay.

What actually works, and the one thing that made me put the book down for a day

Look, the thing Bauer does better than almost anyone else I’ve read in this genre is write children who feel like actual children, not miniature adults or symbols of innocence. Jack is prickly and secretive and doing his best with information he’s only half getting, and his little sister Jess, who is maybe seven, has this run of scenes where she’s just trying to make sense of why her mother won’t get out of bed, and I had to stop reading on the train because it hit closer to home than I expected from what the back cover promised was a “gripping thriller.” That’s the tension of this book in a nutshell: it’s marketed as a thriller and it absolutely delivers thriller mechanics, but the engine underneath it is a family in crisis, and Bauer trusts that story enough to slow down for it.

The real criticism, and I’ll say it plainly: the pacing sags in the middle third. There’s a stretch where Jack is mostly just observing his own life, taking pictures, worrying about his mum, and the murder investigation goes quiet in a way that made me start wondering if Bauer had forgotten she was writing a crime novel. Marvel’s chapters, which should have been providing the procedural spine, feel thin, like he exists mainly to be unlikeable rather than to actually detect anything. I remember getting genuinely irritated around the two-thirds mark, flipping ahead to see how many pages were left before something happened. Something does happen, and the ending recontextualizes a lot of what came before in a way I found more emotionally satisfying than plot-satisfying, but I won’t pretend the back half doesn’t test your patience a little.

And here’s where I question my own taste a bit: I’ve recommended this book to friends who wanted “a good thriller for the beach” and watched them get quietly frustrated with how introspective it is. So maybe what I loved about it, that it cares more about a broken family than about clean answers, is exactly what will bore someone who came for body counts and twists. I don’t think that’s a flaw in the book. I think it’s a mismatch between what the marketing promises and what Bauer is actually interested in writing, which is grief with a mystery wrapped around it instead of the other way round.

The scariest thing in this book isn’t the killer. It’s how easily a child can be left to hold a family together and nobody notices until it’s almost too late.

About Belinda Bauer

Bauer is Welsh, was a journalist and screenwriter before she turned to novels, and it shows in how economically she can sketch a scene and a person in a couple of lines. She won the CWA Gold Dagger for her debut, Blacklands, which is about as strong a start as a crime writer can have, and she’s kept writing books that use the crime genre as a Trojan horse for stories about isolated, damaged people, mostly in rural England. She’s not flashy about it. She just quietly keeps writing books that are better than their covers suggest, which is its own kind of reputation to have.

If this wrecked you a little, read these next

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer, her debut, and honestly the sharper, more focused version of what she’s doing here, told from inside a boy’s obsession with a killer.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, for another story where a crime is really the doorway into a family falling apart and trying to put itself back together.

Wonder by R.J. Palacio, if what got you was Jack’s sisters and the way children process things adults won’t explain to them.

In the Woods by Tana French, for more of that mystery-as-character-study feeling, if you want the atmosphere without the ending answering everything either.

For your book club

1. Why do you think Bauer chose to make the murder investigation feel almost secondary for such long stretches of the book?
2. Jack takes photographs obsessively. What do you think that habit is actually giving him, beyond information?
3. Marvel is a deeply unlikeable detective. Did that choice work for you, or did it weaken the book’s mystery half?
4. How did you feel about the way Jack’s mother’s breakdown is revealed slowly rather than explained up front?
5. Do you think the ending answers enough, or is it more about emotional resolution than plot resolution? Which did you want more?