The Child by Fiona Barton

As a bit of a twist on the standard fare of a thriller our main protagonist is a journalist called Kate Waters, 40-something and one of a dying breed of pre-digital age reporters.  When she stumbles across a small piece in one of the competition's newspapers saying that a newborn baby's skeleton has been found on a building site in Woolwich she decides to investigate.  So, instead of having a "damaged detective" we have a relatively normal journalist driving the tension of the book.  This may have worked better if I had found that I was really interested in who the baby was.

The story is told from 3 main perspectives:

Emma - Lived in the house the skeletonised remains were found in for a large part of the 1970s and 1980s.  She is a bit of a mess psychologically, estranged from her mum, never knew who her father was, believes that the finding of the remains is linked to her and her past.  Even though we spend quite a bit of time with this character I never felt that we got to know her at all.

Angela - Had her baby snatched from the hospital at a few days old in the early 1970s and, even though she went on to have another child (or at least I think she did the timeline is very fuzzy about the births of Louise & Patrick but I am pretty certain Patrick came after Alice) she has never really recovered from the snatching of Alice.  Now the remains have been found she hopes that this could be Alice so she can finally make her peace with what happened.

Kate - Reporter extraordinaire who spends a lot of time bemoaning the move to digital news and celebrity culture.  She often reminisces about "the good old days of Fleet Street" and seems to still use the same techniques she learnt when she first started.  Lot of working on hunches and not being entirely truthful with people to find out what they know goes on.  Not a particularly interesting character but at least we have moved on from the most loved trope of this genre.

The writing itself is actually surprisingly good.  The interactions with characters is believable with the dialogue being actually quite lush in places.  The problem lies with characters that never break free of the page, they are all just flat and pretty two-dimensional.  Even worse, after less than about 20% of the book I had already figured out who the baby was so it then became a guessing game of what had happened to get the baby interred there - unfortunately, my first instincts were correct.

The reveal has this huge build up and when it comes you feel rather let down as it just drops fully formed in to Kate's lap and from that point it is all downhill.  The consequences of the remains being found and identified are also somewhat glossed over with only a few pages summarising the events that happened after and a lot seems to have happened for so few pages.

It wasn't a bad book but I am not compelled to try Ms Barton's earlier book or look out for others.  This was just not a rich enough telling of quite an interesting premise and I did feel a little bit let down.