Picked this up to read for the Horror requirement of my Popular Materials class, but it seems actually to have been more of a thriller. Oh well.
This one was more of a 2.5 rounded up, really. I enjoyed the writing quite a lot - I've never seen, heard, or read so many Britishisms together in my life, and I lived in England for six months. Some nice description, too. The plot and characters didn't so much resonate with me, though.
Basically, the protagonist, Jessica, is a woman whose baby has just been kidnapped. Her husband, Mickey, who had the baby with him at the time, disappears, too, but is soon found sans baby, beaten to unconsciousness. When he recovers, he seems unable to remember what had happened. This does not help the already-rickety relationship between him and Jessica, who spends the book alternating between doing crazy things to try and get her baby back and worrying about her relationship with Mickey. (Not about Mickey himself, e.g. "Will he be okay?", even though he comes close to death at least once, but about their relationship.)
I can understand that a person would do crazy things if she thought it would help her recover her kidnapped child. The key here, though, is that there should be some plausibility in the idea that these particular crazy actions could help. Jessica has tons of smart, hard-working police officers on her son's trail, and she herself is so unstable that an officer is assigned to babysit her; Jessica then seems to use a lot of her energy giving the police slip so that she can do insane things like meet with the . . . drug lord? . . . who her doped-up younger brother thinks can help her find the baby, and who instead tries to sexually assault her, such that the police who would otherwise be trying to find the baby have to come running to her rescue. She does get herself out of the situation just as the police are arriving, at which point she yells at them for not getting there faster.
I sympathize with the fact that Jessica is desperate to take action of some kind rather than just sitting at home waiting for updates, and the author does a good job of painting her as someone who's really coming undone under terrible stress. Glimpses of her backstory and her messed-up family help this case. Still, a lot of her actions seem terribly illogical. Some of this might be me: while I like my reads to have a good balance of intellect and emotion, I'd prefer one skewed toward cold strategizing (assuming the protagonist is not actually a sociopath) than toward this kind of melodrama.
Also, while there's a lot going down about which our protagonist could be stressed, she really zeroes in on the baby thing. Her brother, who was once her best friend, is in a downward spiral. Her husband is lying in the hospital hurt and brain-scrambled. Jessica, though, is having none of it. Babybabybaby.
Part of the reason I say "baby" instead of using his name is that his name, Louis, is one that drives me nuts because you can pronounce it different ways. I think this actually hindered my sympathy in the book, because whenever I hit the name "Louis," my internal-reading-voice, unable to pronounce it, just went, "you know, the baby."
(Nor is this the only disconnect the names in this book caused me. Jessica's husband is supposed to be a major, major hottie. I'm sorry, but the name "Mickey"? In my head, it's got another name attached to it. "Mouse." And I'm just not feelin' the sex appeal.)
Another reason, I think, that I have trouble with the tight focus on the missing-baby issue (and if you can't get behind that, then the book's basically lost you), is the fact that Louis really isn't a character. Mickey speaks and acts, and Jessica has extensive flackbacks about him. Ditto Robbie, Jessica's brother. Louis is just sort of a . . . thing. A precious thing, sure, I'll give you that, even though I'm not a big fan of babies. (It could be that the author is, in part, counting on readers automatically going BABY = MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER, possibly due to her own attitudes? Obviously, I don't know.) But he's not a character - he's a baby. And he's a baby who's absent for almost the entire book. No amount of Jessica's loving remembrance of his peach fuzzy head is going to make me care more about him than I do about, say, the husband who Jessica barely visits in the hospital, even though he feels terrible and is also quite worried about his son.
Plus, the search isn't as tense as it could be. A video is sent early on to indicate that Louis is being well taken care of, and it's established that he was probably kidnapped by someone who has no intention of harming him. So there's not much of a time-sensitive element to the search, except that they need to be quick because every moment's delay increases the chances that Jessica will go postal.
The ending seems sudden and weird to me. So Mickey was in on it, kind of. But not really! But this makes him evil! But all that matters is that Louis is back! So presumably Jessica will . . . leave Mickey? Maybe get up with that police officer she's been abusing for most of the book? Okie-dokie, then . . .
I was genuinely sad about Robbie's death, and sympathized still less with Jessica because of how quickly her focus boomeranged from that tragedy back to the search for Louis.
Also, all of Jessica's involvement with the case was quite forced. She doesn't have any relevant skills, basically, and most of the information she knows could have been passed on to the really-quite-effective police instead of her rather-ineffectively acting on it herself. The fact that she nevertheless wedges herself firmly into every aspect of the investigation is interesting in what it says about her character - she has backstory reasons not to trust the police - but makes for some *headdesk* moments when I really wish she'd just do the smart thing.
Still, not too bad a read for the writing. I probably wouldn't read another thriller by this author, but I'd like to see her try her hand at comedy.