The follow-up to Barton's mystery debut The Widow, a novel in which three women's lives become entwined when a newborn's skeleton is discovered beneath a bulldozed London building site.
...a perfect blend of beach read and book club selection. It's a fascinating and fitting follow-up to her best-selling debut novel, The Widow ... In The Child, the suspense comes immediately. The book’s short chapters and multi-narrative device propel readers forward. Drawn back and forth between each character’s back story and their present situation, one is constantly figuring out what role each plays in the discovery of the child. And as soon as you think you've figured out who did what, it changes. Then changes again. In addition to being a page-turning whodunit, The Child is also a subtle exploration of the relationships between mothers and their children, their bonds and battles.
Barton moves the story along with the same alacrity she used for The Widow, a method that works particularly well for this slightly quieter book ... The Child isn't a book about journalism — any more than The Girl on the Train is a book about alcoholism, or Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a book about being an orphan. Like her fellow novelists, Fiona Barton knows showing is better than telling because it allows for the reader's perspective. When the stories from Angela and Emma converge, whether the conclusion occasions a shock or an 'aha!' doesn't matter; it's satisfying due to all the work that's gone into its discovery.
The best moments in The Child occur when readers tag along with Kate as she works on identifying the long dead infant by talking her way into pubs and flats and combing through old archives. All the while, she’s also teaching her wide-eyed hipster intern the classic techniques of golden age investigative journalism. Enjoyable as those scenes are, however, the rest of The Child should have been sent to the publishing equivalent of Kate’s rewrite desk. The Child is a middling and much-too-long suspense story that would have benefited from a ruthless red-pencil ... Figuring out how all these women are connected — to each other and to the unidentified infant — is the hypothetical draw of this kind of fragmented, multi-perspective type of storytelling. I say 'hypothetical draw,' because The Child is more tedious than tense.
