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Nineteen years before the novel opens, eleven-year-old William Peters, Billy to his family, went down to the local shop to buy sweets and was never seen again. In time, his disappearance is assumed to be the work of one Arnold Avery, a serial killer of children, who buried his victims on Exmoor. But Avery has never confessed to this particular killing and Billy's grave remains undiscovered. As we might imagine, the crime, and especially the inconclusiveness of Billy's disappearance, weighed heavily on his family. His mother, "poor Mrs Peters," has spent the intervening years largely staring out the window as if expecting her missing son to come up the path at any moment. Her daughter, Lettie, who was fourteen when Billy went missing, is now the unmarried mother of two boys, Steven, 12, and Davey, 5. They (and from time to time, a succession of "uncles") live in the rather mouldy Peters family home in a village close by Exmoor, one room of which is kept sacrosanct as a shrine to Billy, with its half-finished Lego project and Manchester City scarf untouched, a striking tribute in so small a house. But most devastating of all is the sense that Lettie and the children suffer from the sense that, compared to Billy, they are of little consequence or comfort to Mrs Peters. Steven is desperate to do something to convince Mrs Peters that she is wrong about him. For the last few years, he has spent a great deal of time digging holes on Exmoor in the hopes of unearthing Billy's remains. Steven is presented as an apparently unremarkable child - even his teacher has trouble remembering who he is - but one with an astoundingly rich inner life, given to moments of existential perception which the reader may or may not find probable in a slightly smelly twelve-year-old. Despairing of ever succeeding in finding Uncle Billy, Steven writes to the man all believe to be his killer in the hope of extracting some sort of answer to his quest. What ensues is a slowly unfolding game of cat and mouse, with chapters alternating between Avery and Steven. It is a brilliant concept, and a highly stylish approach to the well-worn subject of paedophilic serial killers, but one that might be just a trifle too high concept to fully succeed. I had difficulty accepting either of the main characters as altogether psychologically convincing. Avery kills both boys and girls, rather unusual in a compulsive killer, and is also given to exposing himself to young children when he is not actually killing them. He seems to have very little control over his impulses and yet, once caught (and with his track record, one can only wonder why he wasn't stopped years earlier) he is in total command of himself in prison, believing that he will be able to convince the authorities to parole him at the first opportunity if he can maintain a facade of repentance and remorse. As for Steven Lamb - despite his surname, he is far too ingenious to be as innocent as he is meant to be. There is a disturbingly prescient quality to the letters he sends to Avery in jail that I found sat uneasily. Prey to the school bullies, he has but one friend, the repellent Lewis who exploits his passivity and, for no particular reason, betrays him. Would so hapless a child be capable of the ingenuity, dedication, and commitment that Steven evinces over a period of years? All that said, the book has received a great deal of advance praise and the reservations I have about it do not seem to be widely shared. Reading it is certainly a disturbing experience and the tension does eventually become sustained. Bauer writes extremely well on the whole and has managed to come up with a most original premise in a field that has become rather predictable. I myself remained too emotionally detached from both main characters to be deeply moved by the events, but other readers may well respond with less skepticism.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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