"Headlined BABY’S BODY FOUND, two sentences told how an infant’s skeleton had been unearthed on a building site in Woolwich, not a million miles from Kate’s east London home. Police were investigating. No other details. She tore it out for later. The bottom of her bag was lined with crumpled scraps of newspaper – ‘It’s like a budgie cage,’ her eldest son, Jake, teased her about the shreds of paper waiting for life to be breathed into them. Sometimes whole stories to be followed up or, more often, just a line or a quote that made her ask, ‘What’s the story?’Kate re- read the thirty words and wondered about the person missing from the story. The mother. As she walked back with the coffee cups, she ticked off her questions: Who is the baby? How did it die? Who would bury a baby?"
Wow, what a pageturner, even better than Fiona Barton's previous novel - The widow (read my review here).The plot is absolutely gripping, loads of different stories that interlink and an ending that I was not expecting at all!
Kate, the journalist, also main character of The widow, is great, I love her tenacity and passion for her work and how she goes about getting people to trust her.
The novel is written with three main voices, sometimes four, Kate's and the two women who think the baby found could be linked to them. The different voices give the book an interesting pace and the different psychological trait of the three women.
A crime/journalism novel absolutely worth reading!
Overall rating: 8 Plot: 8 Writing style: 8 Cover: 6,5
Title: The child
The Plot:
When a newborn's skeleton is discovered on a building site it only makes a paragraph in an evening newspaper - but for three women it's impossible to ignore.
The Author:
Fiona Barton's debut, The Widow, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and has been published in thirty-five countries and optioned for television. Her second novel, The Child, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Born in Cambridge, Fiona currently lives in south-west France.
Previously, she was a senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at the Mail on Sunday, where she won Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards.
While working as a journalist, Fiona reported on many high-profile criminal cases and she developed a fascination with watching those involved, their body language and verbal tics. Fiona interviewed people at the heart of these crimes, from the guilty to their families, as well as those on the periphery, and found it was those just outside the spotlight who interested her most . . .
