Blacklands

Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb spends his afternoons on Exmoor digging holes, hoping to find a body. While other boys his age trade football stickers, he searches for his uncle, who vanished at eleven, years before Steven was born. Everyone assumes the boy was killed by the serial killer Arnold Avery.

Steven's Nan has never accepted that her son is dead. She keeps watch at the front window, bitter and waiting for him to walk home, while the rest of the family drifts further apart. Steven wants to mend those cracks before it is too late, and he is prepared to hand her the bones of her murdered son if that is what it takes.

When the digging gets him nowhere, he takes a bolder step. He writes a careful letter to Avery in prison. What follows is a game of cat and mouse between a desperate child and a killer who is bored.

This is a psychological crime novel and a first book for its author. The menace is quiet and builds through the correspondence, and the bleak moorland setting and the strain inside a grieving family shape the mood throughout.