Shipcott in bleak mid-winter: a close knit community where no stranger
goes unnoticed. So when an elderly woman is murdered in her bed, village
policeman Jonas Holly is doubly shocked. How could someone have killed
and left no trace?Jonas finds himself sidelined as the investigation is
snatched away from him by an abrasive senior detective. Is his first
murder investigation over before it’s begun? But this isn’t the end of
it for Jonas, because someone in the village is taunting him, blaming him for the tragedy, and watching every move he makes...
Belinda Bauer first novel Blacklands won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel 2010
Talking about the new book, Darkside, Bauer remarked: 'Darkside is
the story of a young policeman who gets hopelessly out of his depth
while trying to catch the killer of elderly and vulnerable people in the
tiny village where he lives with his chronically ill wife. He is
sidelined by the homicide detectives who are called in, and a series of
sinister notes accuse him of failing to do his job.
'Darkside was
terrible to write. I was frequently reduced to tears while wrestling
with what the characters were going through and with all its twists and
turns. I ended up moulding the plot out of clay just so that I could get
some visual sense of what I was doing. It sounds pretentious but it
really helped. When I finished Darkside I hated it but the more I live
with it, the more I like it. I'm interested to see what readers
think...'
Description:
'Darkside was terrible to write. I was frequently reduced to tears while wrestling with what the characters were going through and with all its twists and turns. I ended up moulding the plot out of clay just so that I could get some visual sense of what I was doing. It sounds pretentious but it really helped. When I finished Darkside I hated it but the more I live with it, the more I like it. I'm interested to see what readers think...'