Snap: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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I only started noticing the Italics about halfway through, and in general I find that they don’t bother me quite as much as an excessive use of exclamation points. Your English is perfect but I’m just curious because I was talking to another ESL reader whose English is flawless, but she said books written in dialect are difficult for her to read. Marie Wilks’s 11-year-old sister was found walking up the side of the M50, carrying Marie’s one-year-old son.

I suppose that studying Scottish, Irish and Welsh in university helped a lot, otherwise it would be impossible to understand them. Short summary: The mother is murdered, the father, overwhelmed by grief, disappears, the kids are left alone, the oldest one, Jack, becomes a burglar to support his family and later helps to solve the mystery. Snap is the best kind of crime novel - it gives you chills, it makes you think, and it touches your heart. It just didn’t add anything to the story except for a VERY flimsy moment toward the end where we’re informed by a ham-fisted plot point that their proximity actually did matter!He’s a rumpled, dyspeptic old fashioned copper who’s been exiled to Somerset PD as a result of his less than PC techniques. It is inhabited by a Goldilocks burglar, a child so traumatised, that he is drawn to homes with their pictures of happy families, living their lives of security and love, the antithesis of his own sorrowful, despairing and traumatised life.

Whilst I guessed some aspects of the story, there were also some surprises that made me exclaim aloud so that Snap is a compelling read. He is wanted as a burglar, and despite efforts to direct the police toward the evidence he feels he has discovered, that doesn’t work out. And just like so many killers in crime novels, this one uses a murder weapon that is unique and easily traceable – and the case is ultimately solved using information that was available to the police at the time of the murder. With the odd exception I can’t reveal for fear of spoiling the book for others, I enjoyed meeting all the characters in Snap, but it was Jack who held my attention most.We then learn how these three storylines are related, though it takes a while for these plot threads in the book to converge. Add in themes of family, loyalty, manipulation, loss and grief and even mental health and Snap can actually be read on a deeper level than just as a really good crime thriller. New characters (Catherine and Adam) seem at first to be irrelevant to the main story and to run parallel, but Bauer skilfully weaves their stories together and we gradually begin to guess how they are connected. This story drew me in immediately and after I figured out that it was in fact, not a “whodunnit” story, relaxed and enjoyed the ride. 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.

As you can imagine, Jack become parentified and takes his younger siblings under his wing to raise them. In reality, Rice had gone to the movies with Eric, and Reynolds was spending the weekend with his mother. And I can’t end this review without commenting again on this book’s inclusion on the Man Booker longlist, which in itself caused quite a stir, raising the age-old question of whether genre fiction belongs in a literary prize. Some Italian dialects are impossible for me, but then I’d say I’m more ‘proficient’ than ‘fluent’ so I was just curious if it was challenging for you even as a fluent English speaker.It’s a blisteringly hot summer’s day Eileen Bright’s car breaks down on the highway leaving her and her three children stranded.