THE CHILD by Fiona Barton

When an infant’s skeleton is uncovered at a building site, journalist Kate Waters is eager to get the scoop.  The baby may be Alice Irving, who was abducted from her mother’s maternity ward room while her mother, Angela, took a quick shower.  However, the age of the baby’s remains is a big question that the police must address, and the timeline may not align with Alice’s disappearance.  Thank heavens for DNA testing.  Another woman, Emma, who once lived near the excavation site, seems anxious to learn the baby’s identity, but we don’t find out why until later in the book.  Jude, Emma’s sometimes estranged mother, also is faithfully following the story of the building site baby as it unfolds.  Kate is an empathetic and caring woman who hopes to bring Angela some closure, while at the same time bringing a blockbuster story to print.  I enjoyed this book—the writing style, the format, the pace, the characters, and the plot.  However, I guessed what had happened about halfway into the book, so that the denouement was pretty much a non-event for me.  I think the author could have done a much better job of making the mystery more of a mystery and not telegraphing the outcome plainly.  In fact, this has got to be one of the most obvious mysteries I’ve read lately, and the coincidence factor is also extremely high, making the plot somewhat farfetched.  That said, I raced through this novel, partly because it’s a page-turner and partly because I was eager to put it behind me so that I could move on to something without a forgone conclusion.