Book Awards Reading Challenge

Winner of the Anthony Award for Best Novel, 2004

Two little girls banished from a neighbourhood birthday party take a wrong turn down an unfamiliar Baltimore street – and encounter an abandoned stroller with an infant inside. What happens next is shocking and terrible, and three families are irreparably destroyed.

Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from “kid prison” to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police – all the adults in Alice and Ronnie’s lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances…

Another book that started out well but lost momentum along the way, for me at least. The narration is shared by several of the characters and I thought Lippman did a great job of keeping me sympathetic but slightly suspicious of all of them. It was clear that everyone had secrets they were hiding. The ending wasn’t particularly surprising though and the pace, especially toward the end, was just too slow to be suspenseful. As a psychological drama it wasn’t too bad but I don’t think it lives up to it’s billing on the cover as “a novel of suspense”. Overall it was OK but not the page-turner that I’d been hoping for. (3/5)

Cross-posted on my blog.