Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
The cover shows an old-fashioned empty pram. Along
with the title, and the strap: “The life she wanted wasn’t hers…” a plot
involving baby-stealing is signalled, confirmed by the first paragraph of text.
Agatha and
Meghan are both pregnant: Agatha a shelf stacker in a convenience store, Meghan
a professional and celebrated blogger married to a rising sports reporter. In
the eyes of plain, debt-ridden Agatha Meghan has everything: beauty, money, two
lovely children already, a successful husband, a smart social circle of friends.
What Agatha doesn’t know is that the glamour is a façade with hairline cracks
and, deeper, some festering guilt as yet unidentified for the reader.
But Agatha too has problems, and domestic frustration
coupled with her febrile obsession with Meghan’s lifestyle introduce an alien
twist to a hackneyed theme. A baby is more than a natural event, its being has
become a force, something different. It’s as if, walking in a flowery lane, you
catch a whiff of putrefaction where something has died in the ditch.
This is a psychological thriller. For all that, you guess
what is going to happen and you focus on the babies (that empty pram) but there
are also five adults, very much alive: two women and three men, all seething
with raw emotion, and they are surrounded by friends and others, by extended
families: an outer circle but involved, deeply concerned. An accident (so
called) is waiting to happen. And then a baby is born.
After the birth comes violence, but not where it was
expected and it passes almost unheeded: sudden, shocking, to recede and be
absorbed in the welter of the major drama. A person dying under a train becomes
no more than a catalyst for the events that follow and which lead to a
denouement as inevitable as the murder, and as plausible.
The allure of this book is the empathy engendered in
the reader for the sinners. One feels for the murderer more than for the tortured
blackmailer. This is a tour de force,
the result of a gifted writer delving into the depths of the maternal drive to
come up with a harrowing and exhausting take on a theme that could be as old as time.
