The Child by Fiona Barton

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.