In bleak midwinter, the people of Shipcott are shocked by the murder of an elderly woman in her bed. As snow cuts off the village, local policeman Jonas Holly is torn between catching a brutal killer and protecting his vulnerable wife, Lucy. When the inquiry is commandeered by an abrasive senior detective, Jonas finds himself derided by his colleagues and ashamed to admit to Lucy that he’s been sidelined. It seems his first murder investigation may be over before it’s begun. But when he receives a series of increasingly sinister anonymous notes, Jonas is thrust back into the center of the case. Someone in the village is taunting him, blaming him for the tragedy. Someone thinks he’s not doing his job; someone seems to know every move he makes. And soon Jonas has to ask: Who’s hunting who?Review“Given the shallow pool of prospective victims and suspects, it takes real skill to write a plausible whodunit about an undetected serial killer running amok in an English village. . . . Set against a landscape that would tax anyone’s sanity, Bauer’s grim tale deploys a morbid wit that’s positively wicked.”—*The New York Times Book Review*“Bauer joins such contemporary masters of psychological suspense as Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters with her twisted and tricky second novel . . . The shattering conclusion pulls no punches and will leave many readers stunned, even as they realize how everything fits together.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Another riveting psychological thriller. . . . suffused with pitch-black atmosphere, Bauer’s novel keeps readers guessing until the deliciously unsettling conclusion. No sophomore slump here—fans of Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters would do well to make room on their shelves for Bauer.”—Library Journal (starred review) "Like Minette Walters, Bauer excels at depicting the psychology behind the crimes, and she’s not afraid to take some bold risks with her plotline. Melding the classic horror setting of a small, rural town with an atmosphere of creeping dread, this is sure to appeal to both crime-fiction and horror fans."*— Booklist *“Genteel and suspenseful . . . a most promising career.”—*Kirkus Reviews*"Probably the most shocking ending you’ll read this year. Belinda Bauer is the most disturbing new talent around."—Val McDermid“In her murky tale, Bauer plunges into the realm of the psyche, a brilliant twist . . . adding the final flourish to a nightmarish story where a young woman forfeits a bright future to the ravages of a particularly cruel disease, a murderer bides his time, and the angry diatribes of an investigator are met with shuttered windows and locked doors.”—CurledUp.com“Belinda Bauer won the CWA Gold Dagger for her first crime novel, Blacklands, and she’s produced a barnstorming follow-up with Darkside . . . Bold, mordant compassionate, Darkside confirms Bauer’s reputation as a significant new talent.”*—The Sunday Times* (UK)"Tense and imaginative."—Guardian (UK)“Happily the dark horse is not a one-trick pony . . . [Darkside] is even more accomplished [than Blacklands]. . . . depicted with a wit and warmth that make the macabre bits seem all the more horrible.”—The Daily Telegraph (London)About the AuthorBelinda Bauer grew up in England and South Africa. She has worked as a journalist and screenwriter, and her script THE LOCKER ROOM earned her the Carl Foreman/Bafta Award for Young British Screenwriters, an award that was presented to her by Sidney Poitier. She was a runner-up in the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition for “Mysterious Ways,” about a girl stranded on a desert island with 30,000 Bibles. Belinda now lives in Wales.

Belinda Bauer is "Britain's most original crime writer" (Crime Scene), one of the few authors in the genre to be longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Now she returns with a heart-pounding, heartbreaking, and often hilarious new crime novel in which it's never too late for life to go fatally wrong.Felix Pink is retired. Widowed for more than a decade, a painfully literal thinker, he has led a life of routine and is, not unhappily, waiting to die a hopefully boring death. He occupies himself volunteering as an Exiteer—someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support, then removing the evidence so that family and friends are not implicated in the death. When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of kindness and charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his final breath. But just fifteen minutes later Felix is on the run from the...

FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF BLACKLANDSThe eight-year-old boy had vanished from the car and - as if by slick, sick magic - had been replaced by a note on the steering wheel: You don't love him At the height of summer a dark shadow falls across Exmoor. Children are being stolen. There are no explanations, no ransom demands...and no hope. Policeman Jonas Holly faces a precarious journey into the warped mind of the kidnapper if he is to find them. But there are some who would say that Jonas is the last man to entrust with this job...

EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, Billy Peters disappeared. Everyone in town believes Billy was murdered—after all, serial killer Arnold Avery later admitted killing six other children and burying them on the same desolate moor that surrounds their small English village. Only Billy’s mother is convinced he is alive. She still stands lonely guard at the front window of her home, waiting for her son to return, while her remaining family fragments around her. But her twelve-year-old grandson Steven is determined to heal the cracks that gape between his nan, his mother, his brother, and himself. Steven desperately wants to bring his family closure, and if that means personally finding his uncle’s corpse, he’ll do it. Spending his spare time digging holes all over the moor in the hope of turning up a body is a long shot, but at least it gives his life purpose. Then at school, when the lesson turns to letter writing, Steven has a flash of inspiration . . . Careful to hide his identity, he secretly pens a letter to Avery in jail asking for help in finding the body of "W.P."—William "Billy" Peters. So begins a dangerous cat-and-mouse game. Just as Steven tries to use Avery to pinpoint the gravesite, so Avery misdirects and teases his mysterious correspondent in order to relive his heinous crimes. And when Avery finally realizes that the letters he’s receiving are from a twelve-year-old boy, suddenly his life has purpose too. Although his is far more dangerous . . . Blacklands is a taut and chillingly brilliant debut that signals the arrival of a bright new voice in psychological suspense.From Publishers WeeklyBritish author Bauer's solid debut focuses on Steven Lamb, an unhappy 12-year-old boy who lives with his mother, grandmother, and five-year-old brother in Shipcolt, Somerset. Steven's grandmother is still haunted by the disappearance and suspected murder of her 11-year-old son, Billy, 19 years earlier. The authorities assume Billy was killed by pedophile Arnold Avery, who was convicted of six counts of murder and is serving a life sentence in Longmoor prison. Determined to find Billy's remains, Steven has been methodically digging up the moor near his house. Frustrated by his lack of progress, he writes a letter to Avery asking for information, and so begins a cat-and-mouse game that will have dire consequences. Bauer creates believable tension within the Lamb household as her characters shoulder enormous psychological burdens, though a somewhat far-fetched climax dilutes the quiet power of the preceding story. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review Bauer, whose intent was to write a “small story about a boy and his grandmother,” didn’t quite succeed. Yes, there’s a grandmother and her 12-year-old grandson, but Bauer’s debut is hardly a “small” (read simple and uncomplicated) story. It’s an unsettling novel, with the sort of devastating emotional content that makes it both difficult to read and difficult to forget. Steven Lamb wants nothing more than to find the body of his uncle, taken as young boy (and presumably murdered) by pedophile Arnold Avery, who is now in prison. It’s Steven’s desperate wish that by finding the body, he’ll heal his dysfunctional family and repair his grandmother’s broken heart. Digging holes in the nearby moor (the blacklands), where many of Avery’s victims were found, has revealed nothing, leaving the pedophile himself as Steven’s only hope for ending his family’s pain. Thus begins a carefully orchestrated mail correspondence—just a few words here and there—passed between the two in letters that the recipients must puzzle out. Unfortunately for Steven, Avery quickly gains control of the conversation, which allows him to live in glorious memory of his killings. If the turn of events isn’t totally unexpected, it’s a riveting journey nonetheless, with Bauer remaining fully invested in her troubled characters: one a clever, vicious manipulator; the other an unappreciated, bullied 12-year-old, desperate for love. --Stephanie Zvirin

EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, Billy Peters disappeared. Everyone in town believes Billy was murdered—after all, serial killer Arnold Avery later admitted killing six other children and burying them on the same desolate moor that surrounds their small English village. Only Billy’s mother is convinced he is alive. She still stands lonely guard at the front window of her home, waiting for her son to return, while her remaining family fragments around her. But her twelve-year-old grandson Steven is determined to heal the cracks that gape between his nan, his mother, his brother, and himself. Steven desperately wants to bring his family closure, and if that means personally finding his uncle’s corpse, he’ll do it. Spending his spare time digging holes all over the moor in the hope of turning up a body is a long shot, but at least it gives his life purpose. Then at school, when the lesson turns to letter writing, Steven has a flash of inspiration . . . Careful to hide his identity, he secretly pens a letter to Avery in jail asking for help in finding the body of "W.P."—William "Billy" Peters. So begins a dangerous cat-and-mouse game. Just as Steven tries to use Avery to pinpoint the gravesite, so Avery misdirects and teases his mysterious correspondent in order to relive his heinous crimes. And when Avery finally realizes that the letters he’s receiving are from a twelve-year-old boy, suddenly his life has purpose too. Although his is far more dangerous . . . Blacklands is a taut and chillingly brilliant debut that signals the arrival of a bright new voice in psychological suspense.From Publishers WeeklyBritish author Bauer's solid debut focuses on Steven Lamb, an unhappy 12-year-old boy who lives with his mother, grandmother, and five-year-old brother in Shipcolt, Somerset. Steven's grandmother is still haunted by the disappearance and suspected murder of her 11-year-old son, Billy, 19 years earlier. The authorities assume Billy was killed by pedophile Arnold Avery, who was convicted of six counts of murder and is serving a life sentence in Longmoor prison. Determined to find Billy's remains, Steven has been methodically digging up the moor near his house. Frustrated by his lack of progress, he writes a letter to Avery asking for information, and so begins a cat-and-mouse game that will have dire consequences. Bauer creates believable tension within the Lamb household as her characters shoulder enormous psychological burdens, though a somewhat far-fetched climax dilutes the quiet power of the preceding story. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review Bauer, whose intent was to write a “small story about a boy and his grandmother,” didn’t quite succeed. Yes, there’s a grandmother and her 12-year-old grandson, but Bauer’s debut is hardly a “small” (read simple and uncomplicated) story. It’s an unsettling novel, with the sort of devastating emotional content that makes it both difficult to read and difficult to forget. Steven Lamb wants nothing more than to find the body of his uncle, taken as young boy (and presumably murdered) by pedophile Arnold Avery, who is now in prison. It’s Steven’s desperate wish that by finding the body, he’ll heal his dysfunctional family and repair his grandmother’s broken heart. Digging holes in the nearby moor (the blacklands), where many of Avery’s victims were found, has revealed nothing, leaving the pedophile himself as Steven’s only hope for ending his family’s pain. Thus begins a carefully orchestrated mail correspondence—just a few words here and there—passed between the two in letters that the recipients must puzzle out. Unfortunately for Steven, Avery quickly gains control of the conversation, which allows him to live in glorious memory of his killings. If the turn of events isn’t totally unexpected, it’s a riveting journey nonetheless, with Bauer remaining fully invested in her troubled characters: one a clever, vicious manipulator; the other an unappreciated, bullied 12-year-old, desperate for love. --Stephanie Zvirin

Shipcott in bleak mid-winter: a close knit community where no stranger goes unnoticed. So when an elderly woman is murdered in her bed, village policeman Jonas Holly is doubly shocked. How could someone have killed and left no trace?Jonas finds himself sidelined as the investigation is snatched away from him by an abrasive senior detective. Is his first murder investigation over before it’s begun? But this isn’t the end of it for Jonas, because someone in the village is taunting him, blaming him for the tragedy, and watching every move he makes...Belinda Bauer first novel Blacklands won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel 2010Talking about the new book, Darkside, Bauer remarked: 'Darkside is the story of a young policeman who gets hopelessly out of his depth while trying to catch the killer of elderly and vulnerable people in the tiny village where he lives with his chronically ill wife. He is sidelined by the homicide detectives who are called in, and a series of sinister notes accuse him of failing to do his job.'Darkside was terrible to write. I was frequently reduced to tears while wrestling with what the characters were going through and with all its twists and turns. I ended up moulding the plot out of clay just so that I could get some visual sense of what I was doing. It sounds pretentious but it really helped. When I finished Darkside I hated it but the more I live with it, the more I like it. I'm interested to see what readers think...'

Five footprints are the only sign that Daniel Buck was ever here. And now they are all his mother has left. Every day, Anna Buck guards the little prints in the cement. Polishing them to a shine. Keeping them safe. Spiralling towards insanity. When a psychic offers hope, Anna grasps it. Who wouldn't? Maybe he can tell her what happened to her son... But is this man what he claims to be? Is he a visionary? A shut eye? Or a cruel fake, preying on the vulnerable? Or is he something far, far worse?*Five footprints are the only sign that Daniel Buck was ever here. The Shut Eye is the astonishing new crime novel from Belinda Bauer, twice winner of Crime Novelist of the Year.

From award-winning crime writer Belinda Bauer, "the true heir to the great Ruth Rendell" [Mail on Sunday (UK)], Snap is a gripping novel about a teenage boy's hunt for his mother's killer. Jack's in charge, said his mother as she disappeared up the road to get help. I won't be long. Now eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters wait on the hard shoulder in their stifling, broken-down car, bickering and whining and playing I-Spy until she comes back. But their mother doesn't come back. She never comes back. And after that long, hot summer's day, nothing will ever be the same again. Three years later, Jack's fifteen now and still in charge . . . alone in the house. Meanwhile across town, a young woman called Catherine While wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note reading I could of killed you. The police are tracking a mysterious burglar they call Goldilocks, for his habit of sleeping in the beds of the houses he robs,...