Snap by Belinda Bauer

Description from Goodreads as Amazon’s description only had half of it!

On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack's in charge, she said. I won't be long.

But she doesn't come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.

Three years later, mum-to-be Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note that says: I could have killed you.

Meanwhile Jack is still in charge - of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they're alone in the house, and - quite suddenly - of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother.

But the truth can be a dangerous thing ...

So with a description like that, you’ve just got to get excited about what will happen, right?

Oh boy. This descended into a comedy at times and was definitely not an on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller.

We start off with the three kids being left in the car while their mom goes to call for help from an emergency phone on the side of the road. But the mom does not come back. So off they go to try to find her but no luck. Fast forward and they get picked up and taken home, their mom’s murdered body gets found, and their dad loses it and goes out to get milk one day and never returns. Jack is now in charge and does whatever he can to get food and money for them.

On the other side of the coin is a pregnant Catherine who wakes up with the note next to her and freaks out but doesn’t tell her husband about it. Cue the confusion about pregnancy brain and not being able to take care of herself.

In the town (which is boring and where murders don’t happen enough according to the new police arrival Detective Marvel) the hunt is on for the Goldilocks vandal – someone who breaks in to empty houses and steals things and sleeps in a bed for a night. And obviously these two plots are going to intersect.

The plot at this point is still somewhat going in the right direction. BUT… the execution. You have another cop (Reynolds) working with the team who is an absolute stickler for rules and will not deviate from the straight and narrow. Until he makes an error or two that derail things and then all of a sudden there can be grey areas. You have Marvel who tries to set up a capture house for Goldilocks by “remembering” that if you put bait in the right place it can capture the thing you want. What???

So Goldilocks has found the knife linked to the murder and is trying to get someone to get the cops to see it. The knife is an extremely expensive one-of-a-kind item that apparently the original cops on the case didn’t follow up on. Weird. And now it’s just the path to proving who did it.

You have coincidence after coincidence, a laughable fight scene at the end, the cops being given breadcrumbs to the witch’s house and still nearly missing it (figuratively obviously), and a highly improbable homeless man rescue.

All these elements together just made it a story coasting on a path where you know the killer from relatively early on and are merely waiting to find out what happens. The snap? Hmmm… that was pushing it. Plus the story is not finished off. And what made it worse were the number of exclamation marks and derogatory descriptions of people. I dived into this book really excited for a gripping crime story and closed it with pursed lips and a furrowed brow.