Little Face - Hardcover

Sophie Hannah is a bestselling poet, a novelist and a children's writer. She has won awards for her short stories and for her poetry, including first prize in the 2004 Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition. In June 2004 she was chosen for the Next Generation poetry promotion as one of the best twenty poets to emerge in the last ten years. She has won several awards for her poetry, which is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. She was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is thirty-three and lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and two children.

British author Hannah (Hurting Distance) weaves together two narrative voices to create this complex and occasionally forced thriller set in rural England. Excitable new mother Alice Fancourt calls the police, claiming her baby girl has been replaced by a nearly identical infant. Alice believes her husband, David, is responsible, but it soon appears that David's mother, the rich and formidable Vivienne, is up to no good. Det. Simon Waterhouse has a soft spot for the possibly delusional Alice, with whom he alternates narration, but his undeveloped character renders their relationship, or lack thereof, of little interest. More engrossing is Waterhouse's complicated friendship with his boss, Sgt. Charlie Zailer, a feisty, appealing woman with a major crush on her subordinate. When Alice and the baby disappear and the police reopen the murder investigation of David's first wife, some interesting discoveries are made, but readers enticed by the intriguing opening will find the payoff ultimately unsatisfying. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.