Fiona Barton’s prior book The Widow was a mystery told from the point of view of three characters, including crack reporter Kate Waters. I enjoyed it, and was pleased to receive an advance copy of Ms. Barton’s latest, The Child, from Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Similar in structure to The Widow,, The Child is told from the points of view of three main characters, this time all women:

Kate Waters is back as the intrepid journalist, looking for her next big story as she watches the newspaper business changing around her. “The tsunami of online news had washed her and those like her to a distant shore.”
Emma Simmonds is a young editor whose extreme anxiety about whether he past might catch up to her seems to be threatening the stability she has found in the married life she has created for herself. “He doesn’t know me really. I’ve made sure.”
Angela Irving has a mother’s intuition and her identity as a mother is shaded by the devastating loss she suffered 20+ years ago when her infant was stolen from the hospital right after its birth. “People say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…it doesn’t. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape...Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you.”
The plot centers around the grisly discovery of the skeleton of an infant, unearthed at a construction site. Each of the primary characters has a connection to the unfolding story of the “Building Site Baby,” and this propels the narrative.

The structure of the novel works well and the characters are well drawn. We learn so much about them as their individual searches for the meaning of this event occur. Emma, for example, has a husband who works at a University. Her view of his work environment? “University departments are like prides of lions, really. Lots of males preening and screwing around and hanging on to their superiority by their dewclaws.” (Having worked at a college, I LOVED this line!). Barton’s excellent descriptive skills are clear as Emma reminisces about a house where she lived as a child: “I can still smell that house; years of patchouli oil overlaid by grime, suffocating and musky like a hippie’s old afghan coat.”

 I’m one of those people who NEVER solves the mystery in advance, but even I could see this one coming, so it lost a star there. But that didn’t detract from the enjoyment I experienced as I read this book. I look forward to more from Ms. Barton. Four stars.

This was the first book of Fiona Barton that I have read and I really enjoyed it. I liked how the author drew your attention one way, only to have it twist! I did figure it out about 3/4 of the way through, but it still held my attention and I liked the way she wrapped everything up. Now I'm going to go back and read her other book The Widow and look forward to more!

A stellar second novel by Fiona Barton. Read it straight through!

When the skeleton of a newborn is found on a construction site, three women are drawn to the story - a reporter, a mother who once lost a baby, and a young wife with a secret. The Child alternates primarily between these three perspectives, as the reporter works to uncover the truth about the "Building Site Baby." It is an engaging mystery, but if one is expecting a thriller this book does not really deliver. However, the characters are interesting and I never got bogged down while reading. It is a good beach read!

An unsolved mystery resurfaced when a baby's skeleton was found at a building site.

Along with the skeleton, three main characters emerge too. Kate is a reporter investigating the story. Emma is a nervous adult who became intrigued as well as possessed when she sees the story of the baby. Angela is the mother whose baby disappeared more than 40 years ago never to be found.

THE CHILD took a while to get interesting simply because it was a bit slow, and there were too many characters thrown in. I was lost with so many different characters and couldn't seem to figure out the connection until around half way through the book so don’t give up because it is worth the wait.

As the pages turned and I reached the halfway point, the book started making a connection for me and kept my attention. The mystery became intriguing.

The characters seemed genuine for their roles, but something was odd and different about each of them.

This was my first book by Ms. Barton so I imagine I needed to get used to her writing style and her attention to detail.

There are some good twists to the story as well as some disturbing subjects that are addressed.

All in all, THE CHILD is a good read that will keep you guessing. 4/5

This book was given to me free of charge and without compensation by the publisher and NetGalley in return for an honest review.

This compelling story had me hooked until the very last page, and includes a twist I didn't see coming! Highly recommend.

She left her hospital room for a few minutes to take a shower. Her baby was sleeping peacefully and she wouldn't be gone long. But when she came back, the baby was gone!

Berkley and Net Galley allowed me to read this book for review (thank you). It will be published June 27th.

When the reporter was looking for general interest stories, she ran across a small article about baby bones being found at demolition site. That sounded intriguing and she began digging into it. What she discovers will change her life.

The body is found in an area that has been deteriorating over the years. It has been acquired for new development but finding a body slows it down a bit.

Kate is a bulldog about her stories. She has contacts all over and utilizes them to find out how many babies were reported missing forty years ago or so. She finds three and decides the most recent might be her baby. She finds the mother with more inquiry and goes to visit her. Soon she's convinced the baby must be Alice but why would someone murder a baby?

The story gets more complicated. With a woman obsessed with a man, sexual predators and drugs, a grieving family and another mother grieving a dead baby there's lots going on. As the story plays out, you begin to realize no one is innocent.

The final twist at the end is what makes the story unforgettable. The story twists and ties around itself but at the end there are no secrets. Now everybody has to pick up the pieces and move on.

This is not a book for everyone. It was an emotionally rough read but executed very well. The perspective of reporter, Mother and Emma really complete the picture from a variety of angles and provide unique accounts.

I really thought I would enjoy this one, but that didn't happen. I continued reading, but with no genuine concern for the characters or outcome.

I liked The Widow so I really thought that this would be good pick for me. Honestly, it was so incredibly boring and stale. I couldn't even finish it. I was bored by chapter 7.

I really enjoyed the Widow by Fiona Barton, so I was looking forward to her next mystery. And I have no complaints. If not quite as good, it was still a very enjoyable mystery that I can heartily recommend.

This is a fast paced mystery told from the perspective of four different women. Short punchy chapters keep this book moving right along. At first I was worried about keeping the women straight, but no problems there. Kate is a reporter who zeros in on the story of a baby’s skeleton found at the site of old housing units being demolished. I have to say I wasn't a fan of Jude, who struck me as a total narcissist. Emma, her daughter, has her issues, too. And I just felt sorry for Angela, whose baby daughter went missing from the maternity ward a day after her birth.

At the beginning, I had to question Kate being allowed to follow an unproven story line and devote so much time to it in a time of layoffs, but that’s a minor quibble. What makes the novel work well is how the different stories all come together. The relationship between Emma and Jude was the real clincher to keeping my interest.

I figured out what was happening well before Kate did. But that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for the end of the book.

My thanks to netgalley and Berkley Publishing for an advance copy of this book.

Kate Waters is a news reporter hot on the trail of a story that she hopes will be a big one. A baby’s skeleton has been found in a construction site. Kate can’t get the baby out of her mind. What tragedy was behind the burial of this infant child? Could this baby be the one who was stolen from a maternity ward decades ago? As she digs deeper, secrets come to the surface that will change the lives of three women forever.

The reporter Kate also appears in Ms. Barton’s first book, “The Widow”. The chapters in her new book alternate between three women. First of all is, of course, Kate Waters, the reporter. She’s relentless in the pursuit of truth. Angela is the mother of little Alice who she alleges was stolen from a maternity ward shortly after her birth. Although Angela has two other children, she has never gotten over the loss of her child and longs for closure. And Emma, a woman who seems obsessed with this baby.

The beginning of the book starts off slowly as the author builds her story. It was slow enough that I was considering giving the book 3 stars but the second half of the book pushed my rating up to 4 stars because that’s when I truly became involved in the story. The twist didn’t come as too much of a surprise but it didn’t matter as the main thrust of this book isn’t the “who done it” or even the why but the effect on the characters. I loved how much Kate cared for the people she connected with. I think we have such a callous opinion of reporters, only out for the story no matter what it costs others, so it was refreshing to read of one with a heart. This isn’t so much of a thriller as an in depth character study of three women. We know from the beginning that the baby has died so there’s no suspense there. But the author does a very good job of giving us a look into the hearts and minds of women whose lives were so monumentally affected by one act.

Recommended.

We all know the saying “Oh, what a tangled web we weave… when first we practice to deceive.” In Fiona Barton’s engrossing new thriller, The Child, that tangled web is spun around a single act. Like a stack of dominoes falling when just one is pushed over, it seems almost inevitable that when one string on that web is pulled, the whole construct is torn apart until a shocking secret is completely revealed.

Like most buried secrets, its discovery was always a question of when, not if. As a building is demolished, a workman stumbles across the skeleton of an infant covered by a large cement urn and left undisturbed for years. When London reporter Kate Waters sees the simple two-sentence write up about it in the Evening Standard, she is intrigued. Visiting the neighborhood and then chasing down the construction worker who first found the remains, she writes a larger article about the event, hoping to stir some memories and shed some light on the identity of the baby and why it was left to rot in such a location.

Emma Simmonds has been battling depression for decades, a result of a traumatic childhood experience which ended with her being thrown out of her home at just sixteen years of age. In the present, she has a good job, a loving husband and a cold but cordial relationship with her mother. But the past is a dark pit, a well of memories which into which she could easily fall and drown. When she sees the article about the infant dubbed the ‘Building Site Baby’, she finds herself once more heading towards that dark place.

Jude Massingham is annoyed by her daughter Emma’s melodramatic take on the past. Yes, bad things happened but Jude is all about the future. She’s just received a call from an old flame, an ex whom she never really got over and she doesn’t understand why Emma can’t share in her joy at their possible reunion. She grows increasingly frustrated as Emma’s trip down memory lane begins to throw shadows on her dreams for a lovely future.

Angela Irving has never gotten over the abduction of her infant daughter. Every new case of a missing child being discovered, every case of an unidentified infant body being found is cause for both elation and concern. It’s possible that she will finally reconnect with the child she still longs to hold but it is also possible the police will return with the nasty allegations they threw at her in the past. She desperately wants to know what happened to her precious daughter but she doesn’t want to stir up the hornet’s nest that was the previous investigation. Connecting with Kate Waters looks like a marvelous opportunity to find out all that is happening with the the Building Site Baby but can she really trust a reporter?

Four lives collide as Kate carefully follows a story that will take her to a surprising but deeply satisfying ending. I was intrigued from the first page by what was happening and how the case was unfolding. The tale is deliciously startling, with each twist and turn seemingly coming out of nowhere. Barton is a master storyteller who uses her pacing carefully, starting out slow and easing us into a fast paced conclusion that leaves the reader stunned. In fact, my only quibble with the book is that we start out at what feels like a crawl. This lasts for only a short time and didn’t bother me personally, but I know some fans require more explosive momentum from the start. Stick with it a tiny bit and I promise,you will find it well worth your while.

Each character in our little drama plays their role to perfection. Each of them are at times vulnerable, sympathetic or suspicious. Almost everything is colored in shades of gray, so that it is hard to make out who will wind up the villain of the piece and who the hero. While I enjoyed getting to know most of them, what made this book great for me was the return of Kate and Sparkes. Kate is perfect as a reporter, a combination of just right amount of social justice warrior and ruthless, career conscious woman. Sparkes is exactly how we expect a police officer of his rank and experience to be: curmudgeonly, smart, focused and caring. I like how he and Kate don’t have an easy relationship: They like each other but neither completely trusts the other, and this seems natural given their careers and their often conflicting goals. While this is the second book featuring this duo, it completely stands alone.

The Child is an onion of a mystery, with each layer a wondrous revelation. Fans of psychological thrillers featuring compelling female characters will NOT want to miss this book. Fans who enjoy a good intellectual mystery with some heart will be completely delighted with it. In fact if you like suspense at all, I strongly recommend it; this is likely to be one of the best of the year.

The Child by Fiona Barton is a deep chilling read. After reading The Widow, I found this one to be more exciting. As with the previous novel, the pacing starts out slow and then slightly builds with a fierce intensity. The plot hooked me. I was fascinated to find out who the baby was and how it got there, as well as why. Fiona Barton has a way with adding suspense to every page. The further I read, the more intrigued I was. The story was believable. Entertaining, well-written, and complicated. The main character, Kate will find out more than she planned to...overall, I enjoyed reading this latest novel. I recommend The Child to readers everywhere.

I read this all in a single day. I loved how the characters and their stories were all tangled together. I liked Emma, and Kate, but I didn't like Jude... I think she got what she deserved in the end. Thank you, Netgalley, for this arc.

3.5 stars--between liked and really liked.

This is my first Barton novel; I didn't realize it was a series--well, at least, Kate the reporter also appeared in Barton's first book, The Widow. It didn't decrease my enjoyment of this book, though, and I was never confused.

This is a fast read--at least it was for me, and I stayed up too late devouring it. The pace was very brisk, the characterization was good, and I was satisfied by the ending in a "yay justice is done!" kind of way.

I thought the mystery's solution was pretty apparent at about the 50% mark, and think it would have been very clearly apparent to the cops/the lab technicians as well, but I still rushed through the pages to find out what would happen next. If you like suspense novels, this is a good one.

I received this review copy from the publisher on NetGalley. Thanks for the opportunity to read and review; I appreciate it!

I absolutely adored Fiona Barton’s debut novel, The Widow, so I was all-too eager to get my little hands on this one when I heard about The Child. Of course, that’s the problem with not reading blindly, isn't it--with already being familiar with an author’s previous works: you go in with expectations, undoubtedly heightening your expectations on the author, and it doesn’t always pan out. When that happens, those reads seem to fall harder than if you’d never met their predecessors in the first place. Unfortunately, that’s what happened here.

Not too far into Fiona Barton’s sophomore novel, The Child, I realized that this one wasn’t nearly as clever as her debut, The Widow, and wasn’t nearly as captivating either. Read as a “rush job,” without the finesse and nuance of her previous novel. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of the follow-up to a blockbuster movie--you know, the ones where you can tell the studio was just rushing to churn the next one out to capitalize on the fanfare of the last one.

Have you ever read a novel and just knew you could pick out the characters on the street if you saw them? Their mannerisms are so real, their dialogue so witty, so poignant, so enthralling, that you recall a whole slew of their quotes from memory. These characters come alive on the page and delight you, make you want to be them—or at least kidnap them and keep them as your new bestie. Well, you won’t find that here, people. These characters didn’t saunter around, exuding their very essence across the page like in the previous novel.

Though, to be fair, it’s not all cons in this one. One of the better aspects of this novel is that Barton uses the format of short chapters to swiftly draw her reader in and keep them turning pages. It’s a style that I now recognize her for. That technique makes the read seem shorter, faster, and is a true hallmark of the modern-day thriller, which was once again used brilliantly here. Well, to an extent. Of all things, The Child was chalked full of filler. I could almost palpably feel myself ripping at the cotton-like filler to get down to the meat, the core of the novel. Some of the chapters were completely useless to the plot as a whole and slowed the read down to a near-screeching halt, contradictory to the goals of the short chapters, placing The Child very squarely into the “cozy thriller” category and loosening the tauntness that readers look for in a good mystery thriller.

All I needed for complete this novel was a cuppa Earl Grey and a biscuit. For some, this’ll work brilliantly, but I can see the flatly written characters turning off character piece buffs, while the added family drama will turn off mystery thrill seekers, stripping away its well-roundedness and landing this one in a category for a very specific kind of reader. It’s not that the characters here were unlikeable, more like they were just silly. Crying at the slightest stimulus. Sighing and huffing and wedge-driving over men who, for the majority of the read, weren’t much more than cliché sketches of cheaters and adulterers themselves. There were moments where I actually imagined them fawning and fanning themselves at the thought of these men, swooning in their own misery, and that made the read feel long, like I was trudging through used Kleenex the entire time.

Let’s go ahead and address this here, shall we?

There’s so much chatter in the book world about (female) characters who are unlikeable for being shallow or crass—The Girl on the Train immediately comes to mind—but these characters in The Child were equally unlikeable for a completely different reason: because they were so spineless, weak and lacking of any motivation that I could get behind for the vast majority of the novel. (view spoiler) There were a lot of tears in this book, even moments of rushing out of a grocery store, abandoning their grocery cart, because the noise was too unbearable. These characters all needed a swift kick in the ass if you ask me.

Hmm, and the ending. I won’t give anything away, but I will definitely say that I’m not sure how I feel about it. It could’ve been a phenomenal ending, but it was executed poorly and via unlikeable characters, so, in the end, it just felt like a hastily done soap opera ending. There were loads of other sections that could have been scrapped in favor of perfecting the ending, believe me—and the fact that the ending was held up by sappy, weak-willed characters just ruined it, like spilling liquid on a watercolor painting. (view spoiler) all in all, landed The Child with a average score of 3 stars ***