There's never a moment when the reader sits back on her heels and thinks, 'Well, that might not matter. now found herself evermore redundant in this new world order.' 'The Editor's focus had moved increasingly from investigative journalism to the sort of instant news that got the online community clicking and commenting. While the newsroom is still full, most of its cubicles are filled, not with journalists, but with very young workers trolling the Internet for potential clickbait. As the book opens, things are grim at Kate's paper. However, more important - at least to Barton - is the idea of shoe-leather investigative reporting and how it can transform the lives it affects. The frequent, fast chapters (86 of them!) highlight all of those people and their daily routines. There's never a moment when the reader sits back on her heels and thinks, 'Well, that might not matter' or 'Forget it, it'll never work.' You're in medias res with Kate, Angela, and Emma, and the spliced action-narration is an excellent way of reminding you that no crime affects just one person, and each person it affects has many other people in her life. All three women have reasons to be interested in the 'building-site baby,' as it comes to be known.īook Reviews Lies We Tell Ourselves Propel 'The Widow'īarton moves the story along with the same alacrity she used for The Widow, a method that works particularly well for this slightly quieter book.

Emma isn't sure what she's looking for, but she knows the answer lies in her past as the daughter of a single mother named Jude. Although he saddles her with a young male intern, Terry, like Kate, thinks this find might be a big story.Īlso like The Widow, The Child is told from several perspectives - in this case, Kate's, a grieving mother named Angela, and a younger wife named Emma who is afflicted with terrible anxiety.

When she sees a small mention of the skeleton's find, she convinces Terry to allow her out of the office to make some inquiries. Kate Waters, the newspaper journalist who plied her wits against a canny murderer in the first book, is back and looking for something, anything, to impress her boss, Terry. This time, and it's no spoiler to say so, the 'child' is a newborn's skeleton, discovered at a building site in London. Like her 2016 smash-hit The Widow, Barton's new book centers on a cold case involving a little one. That's not because of the usual 'show, don't tell' dictum that so many novelists hear from instructors, but because Barton has a reason to keep readers firmly in the action. I'm happy to report that Fiona Barton's second novel, The Child, falls firmly into the second camp. Some books tell you a great deal, while other books show even more. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Child Author Fiona Barton

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