Review of Blacklands by Belinda Bauer (Corgi, 2010)

Twelve year old Steven Lamb lives in small village on the edge of Dartmoor with his mother, younger brother and Gran.  The home is haunted by the memory of Billy Peters who disappeared after visiting the local shop.  Every day Steven’s gran stands guard at the front window waiting for Billy to return.  The rest of the town believes the boy is dead, killed by a serial killer, Arnold Avery, who admitted to killing six other children and burying them on the moor.  Steven believes that if he can locate the body he can heal the rift between his mother and gran and every weekend he treks up on the moor with a spade and searches for Billy’s burial site.  As he starts to lose hope he conceives of a new idea, drafting a letter to Avery seeking his help.  And so begins a cat-and-mouse game as Avery toys with Steven, both re-energised by their exchange of letters.

The strength of Blacklands is the idea of a young boy from a troubled home exchanging letters with the murderer of his uncle in the hope of discovering the location of the body.  It’s a novel take on the crime fiction oeuvre.  Bauer nicely sets up the premise, charting Steven’s unsettled home life, the bullying he receives at school, and his quest to resolve the doubt in his grandmother’s mind as to what happened to her son.  Then she weaves in the perspective of Arnold Avery, a predatory serial killer of children, and how Steven’s letters re-ignites Avery’s psychopathic fantasies.  However, the tale is rather narrow and linear in its telling and having spent so much time setting up the premise and manoeuvring people into place the ending was somewhat underplayed and underwhelming.  This was a shame as the story really does have a great hook.  Nonetheless, an interesting and innovative read.