Blacklands set for success
Belinda Bauer, who lived in South Africa as a child, looks set to score a hit with her debut thriller, Blacklands, published in the United States by Simon & Schuster at the beginning of the year.
Its cover shouts are impressive, including Val McDermid’s: “Original, unsettling, and atmospheric, this is a debut that hits the ground running.”
Declared a review on the website It’s a crime! (or a mystery ...): “Bauer could prove to be competition for Minette Walters in the psychological suspense sub-genre, where she takes the ‘normal’ and ‘simple’ facts of life and examines them in another dimension.”
Writing in The Guardian last Saturday, Laura Wilson, author of An Empty Death, said: “This astonishingly assured debut ... for once lives up to the hype.” She ended her review praising a “pitch-perfect tale: a psychological tour de force about the cruelty of hope and, ultimately, the triumph of innocence.”
Blacklands is described as the story of a “dangerous cat-and-mouse game a 12-year-old boy plays with a serial killer”.
She decided to write her script ideas as novels rather than screenplays, and penned Blacklands. Entered for the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger competition in 2008, it was Highly Commended—in effect, the runner-up to winner Amer Anwar’s Western Fringes.
Bantam will publish Blacklands in South Africa in March.
