Snap

On a sweltering day in 1998, Eileen Bright leaves her three children in a broken-down car on the hard shoulder of the motorway and walks off to find an emergency phone. She never comes back; days later, her body is found. Three years on, eleven-year-old Jack has become fourteen-year-old Jack — still secretly holding his family together in their cluttered home, keeping his sisters fed and hidden from social services by burgling houses, and quietly determined to find out who killed his mother.

Elsewhere in the same small town, a heavily pregnant woman named Catherine While wakes to find an intruder gone but a knife left beside a note reading "I could have killed you" — a secret she keeps even from her husband. As a jaded detective works a rash of local break-ins, the separate threads begin to knot together around one cold case.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Snap is a taut, humane crime novel about childhood, loss, and the strange places justice can come from.