Belinda Bauer

Some authors spend hours staring at a computer screen, waiting for that perfect sentence to form like Venus rising from the sea. Others set up workstations at coffee houses, fast food restaurants, and parks, or sequester themselves away in a cabin.

- Oline H. Cogdill

Belinda Bauer drives, cycles, or takes to her bath. While driving her car along the streets and byways of Wales or cycling the roads near her country home just outside of Cardiff, she concentrates on the traffic, the scenery, and murder. Sometimes, when soaking in a hot bath, the plot she was stuck on or the character she was shaping suddenly crystalizes.

“I’m on autopilot then,” says Bauer. “I just forget about everything and that is when it all rises and comes together for me.”

However Bauer approaches a story, it seems to be working for her. The British author’s psychological thrillers are known for their precise characterizations, unflinching— but not gratuitous—violence, and myriad but believable surprises.

Bauer’s thrillers are bestsellers in the United Kingdom, have earned her positive reviews from both UK and US publications, and have garnered two awards. Her seventh novel, The Beautiful Dead, was released last fall in the UK and is being published in the United States in early 2017.

Although Bauer’s first books featured a couple of recurring characters and settings, each of her novels is self-contained rather than being part of a series. What does recur are Bauer’s ongoing themes of betrayal and disappointment that link each novel.

“Betrayal is a part of life,” says Bauer during a telephone interview from her Welsh home. “We are all betrayed at some stage in our lives, in small ways and in big ways. Maybe a better word is disappointment— we all find disappointment in places, people. Life is not always what we expect it to be, or want it to be. I think that is the basis of every crime novel—something goes wrong, we are disappointed and betrayed.”

That sense of betrayal and disappointment certainly imbued her first novel,