The skeleton of a newborn child is found at a construction site. It warrants two scant lines in the Evening Press but peaks the curiosity of newspaper reporter Kate Waters. She asks herself three questions.

Who is the baby?How did it die? Who would bury a baby?

Tired of reporting fluff pieces on celebrities and Royals, Kate convinces her editor to let her do a piece on this baby Doe. My initial impressions of Kate were positive. I loved her reflections on the current state of print media and the challenges faced by reporters competing with 24 hour online news feeds. Her commentary on reporters of old vs the new generation were entertaining and enlightening.

I enjoyed this look at investigative journalism. The story is told in alternating chapters by four women, Kate, Emma, Jude and Angela. Each chapter is brief. Each chapter pulls together more clues to the past and points to answers in the present. Angela wonders if the baby might be the child stolen from her at birth. Emma is upset by the discovery of the baby found on the same street where she and her mother Jude once lived. It is up to Kate to ask the right questions and hunt down the leads to a crime committed almost thirty years in the past.

I liked the alternating points of view with Kate acting as catalyst as the story unfolds. The author’s background as a reporter makes Waters a better than average character study. She is relentless in her search for the truth (and a good story) while showing compassion and empathy towards her sources of information.

This is not a seat-of-the-pants thriller. The few facts are told and retold by the main characters and the various people Kate interviews. The story slowly builds to a satisfying conclusion. I did guess the twist ending but the author kept me guessing right up to the last chapter or two. A win win in my books.

ARC received with thanks from publisher via NetGalley for review.

The Child by Fiona Barton is her second psychological thriller.

First, let me thank NetGalley, the publisher, and of course, the author, for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

To be fair, I enjoyed (but did not love), Barton's first novel The Widow, and approached this one with a little anxiety.   I want to love everything I read, and I want every new author to succeed.  (And I hate wasting my time.)   I am so glad I took another chance on Fiona Barton.  I definitely liked this book!  She did a great job!  It seemed a little grittier, with deeper characters, and a really good premise.   I was not disappointed.

When the skeleton of an infant is found at the site of a building renovation, journalist Kate Waters wants to find out the identity of this poor child, and how the bones ended up buried in a garden.  And so the mystery unfolds.

Told from the viewpoint of four women, the story continues to gain momentum.

Kate Waters is a driven journalist who will not let go of the story.  Even when she gets too involved.  Even when she starts holding back pieces of information.  Maybe the people are becoming more important than the news story.  Kate's husband and kids are starting to miss their mom (and neither the police nor her boss are happy with her).  (We might remember Kate as the reporter in The Widow).

Angela is a woman who has been filled with guilt and pain for over 40 years.  Her baby was stolen from her hospital crib, shortly after coming into this world.  Angela has never been the same, and has never given up on finding her missing child.  Is the "building-site baby" hers?  Her husband Nick wishes she would just "let it go".  It has been a long time, and although he loves his family dearly, he has given up on ever finding their missing child.

Emma is a young woman who is unnaturally interested in the child found at the site. Emotionally scarred from a rough up-bringing, why is she so interested in this child?  Her husband, Paul, is older than Emma, and is a rock, if only she'd let him in on her secrets.

Jude is Emma's mother, a very self-centered woman who cared more for her boyfriend than she did for her daughter.  It doesn't appear that things have changed, as Will seems to be back in the picture again.

The female characters in this book are intense. The males, more shadowy, and yet they still play their roles.  Barton did a good job on the characters.  The relationships, whether between husband and wife, or mother and child rang true in all cases.  They weren't perfect relationships.  They were real.  As well, the relatively short chapters, jumping from one perspective to the next, keep the story moving quickly.  For some reason, however, the beginning of the book tended to drag (maybe it was me).  Once it got going though....WOW!

I will definitely recommend this!

This was a tough one for me to rate because I actually struggled a bit at first. There were parts that were so slow, I wanted to cry. Normally, I would have ditched the book, but I was totally submerged in wanting to see how the story behind the building-site baby unfolded.

I'm glad I kept pressing on because it had some redeeming qualities which made it an overall good read.  

I really enjoyed the six degrees of separation between the characters.  The story is told from multiple POV's: Emma, Angela, Kate, Jude & Will.  

Even though I had predicted certain parts, Barton did a pretty good job of keeping the reader guessing until the end.

An entertaining and quick read with an ending that I didn't expect. The story line was pretty thin, though and it felt like there was a whole lot of padding in place of character development / story complexity. And while I was pleasantly surprised by the ending, it wasn't quite believable. I don't want to say more because I don't want to give it away, but suffice it to say that the perpetrator would have been caught. There were a number of improbabilities that could easily have been resolved with a good rewrite.

There are some books that you fight your way into the story, and, in the end, you're happy that you've done it. For me, The Child is one of these books. But then, I had the same difficulty with The Widow, so maybe the writing of the author is not working for me.

But the story is good, even if I found Alice before the characters...

If you like The Widow, read The Child. You'll like this one too.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-copy of this book.

Great book, just as good if not better than The Widow. The surprise and suspense! What a pleasure to read. Barton has a knack for writing creepy stories that come out not creepy.

A special thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Dubbed a psychological thriller, Barton's newest work takes us to a London construction site where the skeletal remains of a baby are found. Kate Waters, a local reporter, decides to pursue the story of The 'Building Site Baby'. As she investigates, she discovers connections to a decade-old kidnapping of a newborn baby from the maternity ward of a local hospital—the baby girl was never found. Waters is drawn into the past of the people who once lived in the neighbourhood.

Told from multiple points of view, truths are revealed, and Kate must decide which secrets to keep and which to tell.

Without spoiling anything, there is a fantastic plot twist that is brilliantly executed. A slow burn, but worth your patience.

I was very impressed with Fiona Barton's first book, "The Widow" so I was very excited to be able to read an advanced copy of "The Child".
Workman are demolishing an old house in London when they come across the skeleton of a baby buried long ago. A journalist named Kate Waters quickly sees the potential of this heartbreaking find and begins a search for the identity of "the building site baby". Kate doesn't know it yet but she is about to uncover the secrets of the current and former residents of this neighborhood. Some secrets are too terrible to bear.
The strength of the book is definitely in the characters. Their feelings and actions are so real that you cannot but help to either have compassion for them or really despise them. There are also so many twists and turns in the story and I loved how the story just flowed. In some ways, I enjoyed this novel even more than "The Widow" but both are amazing. This is one book that will stay with me for a long time. If you loved "The Widow" then you will definitely want to read this one.
I received a copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley for free in exchange for an honest review.

Hard book to start ..but well worth the ending!!

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

The remains of a newborn baby are discovered on a building site in Woolwich and Kate, a reporter, is drawn to the story and investigates who this baby might have been. Angela and Nick's baby, Alice, was taken from the maternity hospital in 1970 while Angela was in the shower. Initially it seems that the baby might be Alice. However, there is another woman, Emma, who used to live on the street in Woolwich which is being redeveloped, and she has a secret she has never told anyone.

This was an excellent story, told at a good pace. In contrast to "The Widow", almost all the investigating is being done by Kate (as opposed to the police), which keeps things more linear. Joe, Kate's trainee, provided a little light relief now and then and there was just enough of Kate's personal life to make her seem "real" without it becoming distracting. The chapters switch between the perspectives of Kate, Emma and Angela for the most part. At the beginning, especially as I couldn't really work out how Emma fitted into everything, I kept getting confused between the Emma and Angela chapters, but gradually they separated out for me.

I did not see the big twist coming, and although it worked for me and made sense of

SPOILERS

Jude's tendency to prefer her partners over her daughter, I did wonder how she managed to persuade the authorities that Emma was her daughter - how did Emma get a birth certificate?

Recommended and definitely a better plot than "The Widow".