TUESDAY SPARKS: “THE CHILD”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is from an e-book recently downloaded, but which I’ve been eagerly awaiting:  The Child, by Fiona Barton, “a perfect blend of beach read and book club selection. It’s a fascinating and fitting follow-up to [Barton’s] best-selling debut novel, The Widow. . . .[A] page-turning whodunit….A novel that is both fast-paced and thought-provoking, it keeps the reader guessing right to the end.”—USA Today”

 

 

 

Intro:  (Emma – Tuesday, March 20, 2012)

My computer is winking at me knowingly when I sit down at my desk.  I touch the keyboard, and a photo of Paul appears on my screen.  It’s the one I took of him in Rome on our honeymoon, eyes full of love across a table in the Campo dei Fiori.  I try to smile back at him but as I lean in, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen and stop.  I hate seeing myself without warning.  Don’t recognize myself sometimes.  You think you know what you look like and there is this stranger looking at you.  It can frighten me.

But today I study the stranger’s face.  The brown hair half pulled up on top of the head in a frantic work bun, naked skin, shadows and lines creeping towards the eyes like cracks in pavement.

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Teaser:  (Emma – March 26, 2012)

My yoga teacher is doing a guided relaxation, her voice purring over the tinkling of finger cymbals, lulling us into a coma.  I love this bit of the class normally, but today I’m lying on my mat trying not to think about the ghosts of Howard Street.  About the baby.  About Professor Will (p. 63).

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Synopsis:  As an old house is demolished in a gentrifying section of London, a workman discovers a tiny skeleton, buried for years. For journalist Kate Waters, it’s a story that deserves attention. She cobbles together a piece for her newspaper, but at a loss for answers, she can only pose a question: Who is the Building Site Baby?

As Kate investigates, she unearths connections to a crime that rocked the city decades earlier: A newborn baby was stolen from the maternity ward in a local hospital and was never found. Her heartbroken parents were left devastated by the loss.

But there is more to the story, and Kate is drawn—house by house—into the pasts of the people who once lived in this neighborhood that has given up its greatest mystery. And she soon finds herself the keeper of unexpected secrets that erupt in the lives of three women—and torn between what she can and cannot tell…

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What do you think?  Have you read this one?  Would you keep reading?

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