It is a stifling hot summer’s day and a car breaks down on the motorway. The driver, a pregnant mother of three, pulls up, leaves her children in the car and goes for help. She never comes back. This is the emotional opening scene of Snap by Belinda Bauer.

The father leaves them as he can’t function without his wife. Jack, the eldest child, takes on the responsibility of parenting in rather an unusual way. He becomes adept at breaking into people’s houses, sleeping in their beds and raiding their store cupboards to feed his younger brother and sister. The police call him ‘Goldilocks’. The rage inside him is tempered with the constant longing for his mother, and the need to discover who murdered her.

There are twists and turns throughout the book and humour too in the form of the two policemen who are searching for ‘Goldilocks’. Bauer digs deep into this family’s trauma. Throughout the book you are kept in suspense. This is not just a crime novel but a gripping psychological thriller.

Snap was long listed for the 2018 Booker Prize and Val McDermid has deemed it ‘the best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’.