Belinda Bauer

Snap opens with three children left in a broken-down car on a motorway hard shoulder while their mother walks to a phone box and does not come back, and then follows the eldest three years later, burgling houses to keep them fed. Bauer was longlisted for the Booker with it in 2018, which almost never happens to a crime novel and annoyed a number of people. Blacklands, about a boy writing letters to a child murderer in prison, won the Gold Dagger for her first book. She is Welsh, worked as a journalist, and wrote screenplays before novels.