Expect to lose a lot of sleep when you pick up Burnt Snow! This debut novel by Van Badham is an astounding mix of YA romance, Hitchcockian suspense, Graham’s Green-ish wordsmithing and paranormal skullduggery! How’s that for trying to sum a book up! Let me explain.

Burnt Snow gives us Sophie Morgan, a year 11 student relocating from Sydney to a NSW South Coast town when her father gets a new job. Within the first few pages of the book we already have a growing sense of menace and dangerous secrets as Sophie looks around the town and starts at school.

Despite being introduced to quite a range of people at school, each one has a definite personality and role within the plot. I’m used to peripheral characters being caricatures of school-types, so it was refreshing to have such a large cast be quite natural and believable. Well, it was refreshing and it also inspired a few nightmares because while I quite enjoyed school, Van Badham’s characters brought back the fear of teenage social humiliation with a vengeance!

While there’s a certain inevitability in Sophie’s attraction to the bad boy Brody Meine this is developed with a matching level of both teenage fascination and suspenseful danger. Their interaction is wonderfully explored and, as with the rest of the book, you completely believe in this pair as they try to work out just what is happening.

While I was completely ‘with’ Sophie at school, it was the increasing level of menace that absolutely made my neck start to spasm with anxiety. Can I just say that Hitchock’s The Birds completely freaked me out and when Van Badham brought a crow into the plot I was ready to hide under the bed. Yes, I’m a wuss with a vivid imagination, but with each page of this very long book I could feel the tension compounding.

This is a terrific book. Yes it’s long and perhaps too detailed, but it grabs you, shakes you, and makes your breath catch at the back of your throat. This is suspense written by a master – not for the nervous!