![]() ![]() By getting inside their evil little heads. ‘This is how you’d crack the bad guys: By being cleverer than them. Touching Distance By Graham Hurley Orion Books 352pp £16.99 order from our bookshop I’m usually allergic to adult books with juvenile protagonists, so was surprised to find myself hooked by this one, partly because I was in flooded Cornwall while reading Bauer’s description of the West Country’s incessant rain, but mainly because she writes so beautifully, plots so cleverly and exhibits a razor-sharp understanding of people and places. ![]() There is a terrible inevitability to the rest of the story. Ruby tells herself that she will help her father catch the killer because then he will love her more. When several women are abducted and forced to ring their mothers, who must hear them being murdered, the village’s unemployed men set up as vigilantes. ![]() One of them is ten-year-old Ruby Trick, whose mother has to work because her father has lost his job. ![]() It is a dank place that reeks of kelp, with only twenty houses and five children, who are forced into a semblance of friendship. But Limeburn, a rural slum at the bottom of a steep valley near ‘the greedy sea’, is very far from an idyll. In this story, she takes us to north Devon. This is Belinda Bauer’s fifth book, and like the others it is set in an area that most people think of as a place for idyllic holidays. ![]()
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