A satisfying page-turner! The short chapters and multiple perspectives kept me engaged and up until the wee hours finishing the book. The story opens when a tiny skeleton is found during excavation of a building site. The book is told from the perspective of four people: the journalist Kate, Emma and her mother Jude who used to live in the neighborhood where the skeleton was found, and Angela, whose baby was stolen from the maternity ward many years ago. While it seems obvious the skeleton is Angela’s baby, the truth is more complicated than the set-up would lead you to think.

The suspense was carried throughout the book, with enough twists and turns to keep things interesting. I had a little trouble keeping everyone straight at first but my persistence paid off. There are secrets to be discovered and the author reveals just enough to keep you turning the pages. I found the surprise twist and the ending satisfying on several levels.

Although this is a standalone, I liked the recurring character of the journalist, Kate, who we first met in the author’s first book, The Widow. The author’s background in journalism is evident in how she writes her character, and I hope she is featured in the author’s next book.

The Child is a multi-layered mystery with one burning question: Who is the Building Site Baby?

The story is told from the perspectives of four women:

*Emma: A reclusive, secretive woman married to a (much older) man. The discovery of the baby's remains leaves Emma obsessed with the need to know what the police know about the child.

*Jude: Mother of Emma, with whom she has a strained relationship due to events that happened when Emma was a teenager.

*Angela Irving: Her newborn baby was kidnapped from the hospital years ago, and never found. She believes the Building Site Baby might be the remains of her long-lost child... which is creating tension within her family.

*Kate Waters: Newspaper journalist investigating the story of the Building Site Baby. Will the remains prove to be that of the lost Irving child... or someone else?

For me, the book seemed to start a bit slow, and I had a momentary thought of setting it aside. I persevered, however, because I HAD to find out the identity of the baby! And I'm so glad I did, because the slow start was not at all indicative of the way the story flowed throughout the rest of the book. (To be honest, maybe the "slow" start had more to do with me being distracted by others as I read, which could easily have skewed my perception of its beginning.)

I enjoyed this story a great deal. The layers of mystery made the book even more intriguing, and it was great fun for me to try to work out all the pieces of the multiple puzzles. I did manage to figure out one thing, but there was another reveal at the end that I never saw coming. It was a fantastic twist, and I loved it!

This is the first book I've read by Fiona Barton, but I'm sure I'll be reading more from this author in the future! If you haven't read it yet? You should!

(Now that my review is finished, here's an amusing story. I originally requested an ARC of this book through First to Read. I had it long enough—and read enough books in the interim—to forget that I had it. Then I noticed it on Netgalley—didn't remember I already had it—and requested it again. You have no idea how foolish I felt when I realized I now had TWO copies of the same ARC. Ah, well. It served to teach me the importance of making sure I'm not requesting a book I already have! #BookBloggerProblems, indeed. 😂)

I received an advance review copy of this book from Berkley via First to Read and Netgalley.

There have been several really good “shifting perspective” books published recently, and “The Child” continues this trend. And it’s also good. So, so good.

The main characters are three women: Kate, a journalist who becomes intrigued when the body of a baby is found buried on a building site; Angela, whose baby disappeared from the hospital 40 years ago; and Emma, a fragile woman who lived in the apartment block the baby was found behind and, by her own admission, is hiding secrets. The three of them are all drawn into this tragic story. It’s up to Kate to find out how.

The central mystery of the book is, of course, the child. Who is it? How did they get there? As the reader is taken on this journey, we find people who are hiding their pasts, who are insecure, and it makes for great dramatic reading. I was immediately drawn into the story. There so many possible answers to this mystery in these characters in their lives that you become completely obsessed.

I didn’t get the ending at first, but at about 85 percent of the way in, there was a reveal that laid it out for me. It was a great ending that satisfied me fully and wrapped up most of the major storylines. Which is a credit to the author because there’s a lot going on in the book, so to have it wrapped up nicely is quite a feat.

Overall this book continued a great summer of reading for me and I would recommend it to anyone who loves mysteries and thrillers.

I look forward to reading more from this author.

I enjoyed this mystery being told in alternate perspectives. The mystery was written well and kept me changing the direction I thought it was going.

When the skeletal remains of a baby are uncovered, two women believe it is their baby. We find out early on that Angela’s baby was stolen from the hospital a few days after she was born. For Emma, it takes most of the story to find out what happened to her baby and why she thinks the remains are hers. Who is the real mother?

This is my first book to read by Fiona Barton. I did get hooked into the story from page one. The chapters are short and the story moves along quickly. Just when I though the story was over, I saw I had about 10% left to read. Uh oh - something else is going to happen!

Thanks to Berkley Publishing, via Netgalley, for allowing me to read this in exchange for a review.

I have not read Fiona Barton's first book, "The Widow," although I probably will now. Her sophomore effort, "The Child," is intriguing and suspenseful Who is the baby found on the building site? How are the characters and their stories connected? What does it mean to be a parent? To grieve? To confront and accept one's past? "The Child" is about all of this while being a page turner. I did guess the answer to the central mystery but this did not in any way lessen my enjoyment of this novel. I feel confident that Fiona Barton's next book will be, "third time the charm." Recommended for suspense fans.

Another winner by Fiona Barton! She switches between past and present seamlessly with a phenomenal ending!!

A tiny skeleton is discovered at a construction site in a suburb outside of London. The discovery was made during excavation for updated homes. Kate Waters is a newspaper journalist and reads about this riveting story. It has been two years since she has had a big feature and she is intrigued by the article. She can’t stop thinking about what might have happened to this child.

As Kate investigates the story, she seeks information about former residents from the area. She is hoping that somebody from the neighborhood can provide possible leads about the identity of the baby. Kate crosses paths with Angela whose baby was stolen from the local hospital almost forty years ago. Angela is now a grandmother and lives with regrets about the fate of her baby named Alice. She also meets Emma who lived in the building as a teenager. Emma has been plagued with anxiety most of her life and has a strained relationship with her mother. Kate continues to dig deep into the mystery surrounding the skeleton and how it might relate to any of these women.

This story is narrated from each of the women’s perspectives creating a suspenseful psychological thriller. It is a mystery and to include more detail would spoil the book. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel by Fiona Barton.

A good mystery with an interesting plot with a twist at the end. However, it was just a little slow for me after I got through the first half. It became predictable as I came close to guessing the outcome.

How did I not see the ending before it happened?! I think that's the mark of a good book, when you don't guess the ending but looking back you can see it plainly and it makes so much sense. And that's how I felt about this book. Great characters, great writing, a great story. I also enjoyed that it was fairly clean, as crime books go, and that it was tastefully written.

The first buried secret that propels Fiona Barton's  new novel of domestic intrigue, The Child (Berkley, digital galley), is an infant's skeleton found by workers tearing down London houses. Barton quickly connects four women to the old bones and then alternates perspective among them. Kate Roberts is the seasoned reporter who writes the initial story, "Who is the Building Site Baby?'' Emma is the book editor who struggles with depression and who used to live on the street where the bones were found. Both she and her narcissistic mother Jude, still looking for Mr. Right after all these years, see the story, as does Angela, whose baby was stolen from the maternity ward years ago. She's convinced the skeleton is her daughter, Alice, but she's been wrong before. As Kate diligently tracks clues to the baby's identity, more secrets surface, leading to the book's other question: How long can you live with a lie that has shaped your life in untoward ways? Like Barton's previous novel The Widow, this one offers interesting answers.
from On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

Great mystery/thriller by Fiona Barton. I thought the characters were well thought out and the ending was unexpected.

When journalist, Kate Waters, reads that a child’s skeleton has been found buried in a London construction area, she wonders if there is a bigger story here. After some investigation, she discovers secrets and pieces of a puzzle that don’t seem to fit together. The skeleton is identified as a baby that had been kidnapped from a hospital over 40 years ago. The police don’t hold out much hope for this case to be solved after so much time has gone by.

Kate has no intention of letting this go by without at least trying to find some closure for the parents who have suffered all these years not knowing what happened to their baby. She ends up discovering a bigger story than she ever expected.

I must admit this book started off slow for me, but then it picked up tremendously and I couldn’t stop reading. The chapters are short so it made it even easier to keep swiping my e-reader. I had to know how this all ended. I had a good idea, but I wasn’t sure of all the details involved.

Each chapter is told from a different point of view - Emma, Kate, Jude and Angela. This technique made it quite interesting as you read what each person is thinking and going through. For me, it enhanced the story very much. I thought it might be confusing, but it wasn’t.

It’s a fascinating story delving into the psyche of different characters - their different emotions and motivations which guided the characters and their decisions.

It may have started out slow for me, but after the first couple of chapters, it was anything but that. The book sped by, keeping me up for hours at night reading. I was disappointed when it ended. I already miss the characters. I will definitely be looking for more books by this author.

*Thanks to NetGalley for a digital copy of this book!*

I really enjoyed this book. The characters were empathetic. The story had so many twists and turns and I really didn't know where it was going. Although I had some ideas throughout the story, I certainly couldn't have predicted the outcome. The plot was well thought out as evidenced by the way the story came together at the end. I liked the reporter's personality and her perseverance in looking into the story. Switching perspectives between the women was very effective in telling the story, and enhancing the plot twists. Emma's husband's support for her was wonderful, although unfortunately I think, somewhat unrealistic. I did not read her earlier book, The Widow, but I plan to now!

This was an exciting read. I did figure out the ending before it was over, but it was still good to see how the characters found out. I liked reading about the reporter, Kate, and seeing how she went about figuring things out.

Last year, Fiona Barton burst onto the scene with her debut, The Widow. Last week, her highly anticipated second book, The Child, hit shelves.

Like The Widow, this is a hard one to sum up without giving too much away, but here goes!

It's been a while since breaking the story about baby Bella and Kate Waters knows she can't ride that wave much longer. So when the story about the bones of an infant being dug up at a local construction site breaks, she decides to dig deeper.

Her investigation takes her to Angela Irving, a woman who's convinced the remains are those of her own daughter who went missing years ago. But Angela isn't the only one watching the story closely.

The story alternates between Kate and Angela as well as Emma, a woman who is certain the police will come knocking on her door any minute for reasons that aren't clear to the reader in the beginning and Jude, Emma's mother.

If you enjoyed The Widow you will definitely love The Child. Barton employs the same quick pace and careful attention to detail in her second outing. Each narrator offers up tiny clues that move the story along. Even still, I wasn't able to figure out the end before it came.

When we met Kate in The Widow, I didn't love her. And I think that was the point. In Barton's debut, the reader wasn't supposed to be sure who to trust and Kate seemed like just another reporter nosing her way into someone's private business. In that case, a grieving widow. Of course, things there weren't quite what they seemed, as we learned soon enough.

By now, though, I love Kate. I love her tenacity and her tendency to follow her gut instinct. More than that, I love that she rallies in the face of her paper going ever the way of so many others. She's not going to go down without a fight and she's not going to let the story go until the truth has been revealed.

The Child by Fiona Barton is the author’s follow up to last year’s hit The Widow. Like The Widow it follows multiple perspectives in the midst of a criminal investigation and deals with themes relating to motherhood and kidnapping. When the body of a baby is discovered during a construction project in a gentrifying area of London, investigative reporter Kate Walters (introduced in The Widow) tries to get to the bottom of the baby’s identity and who buried it decades before.

I have a confession to make: I have not yet read Fiona Barton's debut novel, The Widow. I might be one of the last readers on the planet who hasn't read it, but there you are. I've read all the excellent reviews and even purchased a copy but I just haven't gotten around to finding the time to dig in. I mention this as somewhat of an explanation as to why I jumped at the chance to read this, her sophomore novel. Between this urge to get ahead of the game and read it before it comes out and the attention-grabbing synopsis above I was not going to let this one pass me by and be relegated to the never-ending TBR pile. I'm so glad I fit this one into my reading schedule because it definitely kept me entertained and was the perfect distraction for my rainy day weekends in Florida!

The novel begins with the discovery of a baby's skeleton during the demolition of a house in London and continues for a little over a year as the police and journalist Kate Waters investigate to find out not only who the "Building Site Baby" is but why she was buried there in the first place. The story goes back and forth between four perspectives: Kate, a journalist looking to not only help uncover who the baby is but hopefully use the story to reignite her somewhat stagnant career; Emma, a woman who grew up on the street where the baby was found and who seems to begin having a resurgence of mental health issues triggered by learning about the discovery; Jude, Emma's mother who kicked her out of the house at sixteen at the prompting of her boyfriend; and Angela, a woman who's baby was kidnapped from the hospital decades ago and who never got over the loss of her newborn. The story unfolds somewhat slowly at first and these women seem to only tenuously be linked to each other by their reactions to the discovery of the baby. However, as the story begins to pick up (somewhere around 1/3 of the way in) the ties between the women become more solid, all leading to an incredibly shocking revelation.

I have to say that, whenever I start a mystery or thriller book, I always write down my initial prediction of what the outcome of the story will be and, in this case, I was pretty darn close in my prediction, although the "big reveal" and the way we got to that discovery completely threw me for a loop. I think having Kate Waters, a seasoned journalist with quite the skill at getting to the heart of a mystery and getting people to open up to her, as one of the main characters was perfect and made the revelations feel natural and realistic. While some of the smaller surprises were easy to see coming I still enjoyed seeing how we got there and learning the reasons things happened the way they did.

Possibly my favorite part of the story were the characters, especially Kate. She is such a salty yet compassionate and resourceful person and I just loved the spots of levity and shots of adrenaline she brought to the table. While the other characters weren't quite as likeable (especially Jude and some of the secondary male characters) they were all very well developed and realistic and all served a purpose in the overall development of the story. Emma and Angela provided the most sympathetic situations and while they were both put through hell in different ways I was very satisfied with how their stories tied up.

Something else I enjoyed about the story was how it developed to be so much more than just the discovery of a buried baby. It dealt with the complicated relationships between mothers and their children and the myriad of outcomes that can develop from that sort of relationship. There are few relationships more complex then between a parent and their growing children and I enjoyed watching these different scenarios play out.

The Child is wonderful summer reading and I very much enjoyed my time with it. While I wouldn't call this face-paced or necessarily "page-turning suspense" I would say it's an excellent mystery filled with interesting characters placed in some unimaginable situations. I am now very excited to make some time to read Fiona Barton's first novel!

From my blog: Always With a Book:

My thoughts: I was a big fan of Fiona Barton's debut novel, The Widow, and so I was ecstatic to see that not only did she have a second book coming out, but that it contained a beloved character, the journalist Kate. But not to worry - this is not a series or a continuation of the prior book. These are separate stories that just happen to have one re-occurring character.

This book is so good - it's an intricately written, character-driven story. It's narrated by four women and I loved that it was told this way. This allows us to get inside all four women's heads, giving us that emotional attachment, if you will, to each of them, letting us understand their thinking and motivations. All these women's lives are upended by the discovery of the tiny skeletal remains and I loved trying to figure out just how these women were going to all intersect.

I was so excited to see that Fiona Barton decided to write another story with Kate Waters, the newspaper reporter from The Widow. I really like her character, especially given that Fiona herself was a journalist. Is it possible that Kate is a mirror image of herself? I'm not sure, but I really hope she continues to keep writing stories with Kate as a character - she is so intriguing and while I feel this book, in particular, delves a little more into her background, there is still more to her than we know.

This is not a fast-paced mystery by any means, but rather a slow-burning one. Slowly, pieces of the puzzle are revealed. As we learn more and more about each of the women, secrets start to come to light, revealing what happened so long ago. And I loved that the ending is not rushed. It was just perfect for the entire story...heartfelt and satisfying, yet still filled with some good twists and turns. This is a great psychological thriller, make no mistake. It's just not the crazy page-turner that some of the other books are...this one is a slower, take it all in, kind of book.

This is an addictive, emotional read and I really enjoyed it. I am a big fan of Fiona Barton's work and I just hope that this isn't the last we've seen of Kate Waters...will she be appearing in book 3? I guess time will tell. But either way, Fiona Barton is definitely a must-read author for me!

I read The Widow last year, I really enjoyed it. I was looking forward to reading The Child. I'll admit, I didn't love this one as much. It didn't suck me right away. But, I am glad I stuck with it because I did ultimately enjoy the story. The beginning is a bit slow and doesn't really pick up until the 35% mark, so keep that in mind. I think the story probably could have been a little shorter and it still would have made for a gripping read.

This is definitely a hard book to discuss without spoilers. So, read the synopsis to get a gist of the story. The story is told through flashbacks and in the present through the eyes of several characters. In the beginning, it was pretty unclear how they all fit together. I did manage to figure it out before it was revealed. There were still a couple of surprises, so I wasn't too disappointed.

The book can be read as a stand alone. Even though a couple of the characters from The Widow are in this one, it is completely unrelated. I did feel like I got to know Kate a bit better here. She was a good investigative reporter, but I felt she pushed the boundaries too many time in order to get the story out first. I was conflicted because while she could be sensitive toward those involved, she could easily drop that when she was hot on the trail of her story's bottom line. I was horrified at her glee once the baby was initially identified. But then this is probably my own bias toward reporters coming through.

I do recommend this one. This was an enjoyable mystery and second book by this author. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.