Jack resorts to doing whatever is necessary to keep his family together and away from social services. Jack starts to think more about his mother’s death, and he is filled with rage at the fact that his mother’s murderer was never caught. Kate Atkinson used to be the undisputed master of this sort of mixture of the serious, the exciting and the anarchic, but Bauer is now firmly in her class. Who needs to hear the stories of urban Native Americans, a tale about toxic masculinity or about the fight for Indian independence if you can chill with a cute little kid who becomes a detective to find out who murdered his mom? Though Snap was a slow-burner and wasn’t filled with one action-packed scene after another, it kept me turning the page, mainly because of the realistic and relatable characters, with tension building slowing and steadily throughout the story.

The mystery is resolved at about the halfway point and the second half of the book is about collecting the evidence. I really think it's tough for authors out there to come up with unique and interesting thrillers lately. He's actually quite skilled at what he does, (breaking and entering) but he only strikes when he knows the householders are away - less risk that way!Oh, and there was also the theme of snap decisions which ran throughout the story — and how such hastily made decisions can ultimately change the course of our entire lives in a single moment. The plot is completely irrelevant as long as you can take people on that journey with you, say to them: ‘You know what?

I’d highly recommend this to anyone looking for an intelligent, character-driven read and I completely support the book’s inclusion in the Manbooker longlist! Reynolds and Marvel are completely different characters - Reynolds is meticulous in every aspect of his life, not one to push the boundaries. I’ve talked before about the near-impossibility of divorcing your experience with a book from the context in which you read it; who knows how I would have reacted to this if I’d approached it as a guilty-pleasure thriller and not as a Man Booker nominee, but I did read it as a Man Booker nominee, and I’m at a loss as to how this run-of-the-mill, anticlimactic, bland thriller was able to hoodwink five judges into thinking it’s anything more than a supremely underwhelming contribution to the genre (Val McDermid’s influence aside). She has no idea where it came from and she makes a “snap” decision not to tell her husband about this which ends up almost costing her everything!As the book progresses, clues emerge, false explanations appear and are gradually resolved and finally at the end, often with a late twist, all is made clear and the mystery is solved. This is why I finish terrible books, for the satisfaction of sitting down and writing a rant that comes about 500x more easily than a 5-star review. About a medical student with Asperger’s who is out to solve a murder, Rubbernecker won the Theakston’s Old Peculier crime novel of the year prize. It DID have the readability factor going for it though so I wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t a slog, just a plot-hole ridden mess.

I have been reading quite a few classics and the crisp modern style, the unexpected facets in the characters of the people in the story, it just grabbed me, curious, and mysterious, and sad and yet hopeful. It starts off a little slow and I had no idea where things were going, but Jack’s character kept me reading. Bauer had been, despite initial misgivings, thoroughly assimilated into the crime-writing community. And I’m still an advocate of genre fiction having a place in the Man Booker and other literary awards… provided that it’s really exemplary genre fiction.The characters were brought skilfully to life, and although Jack's loss was difficult to witness, there was lots of light relief in the form of Reynolds and Marvel.

Detective Chief Inspector Marvel thinking about the murder: "Investigating a murder was like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.

Snap reveals the unraveling of a family in which murder has thrust itself front and center into their lives.