The Child Before
Crime, Mystery
Michael Scanlon
Detective Finnegan Beck, Book # 2
Bookouture
June 5th, 2019
ebook from netgalley
357
English
April 28, 2019 May 14, 2019
She began to sing, the girl. Her voice was soft, so soft it was almost of the wind. It was a lullaby. She cradled her arms, rocking them gently back and forth. As if she was holding a baby. But she was not. Her arms were empty.
On a cold morning a cyclist finds the brutally-slaughtered body of a woman in her car, on a remote lane leading to the long-abandoned Irish village of Kelly’s Forge.
But when Detective Finnegan Beck arrives from the nearby town of Cross Beg to investigate he notices there’s a baby’s seat in the back of the car. A bottle of baby’s milk lying in the footwell. And no child.
Little Róisín isn’t the first child to go missing from that same remote location though. There was another baby girl, taken more than fifty years before, who was never found. Has too much time passed for there to be a connection, or does something – or someone – link these two crimes?
Beck claims he does not want to stay in Cross Beg. His heart is back in Dublin, with the woman he loves. But, knowing that a child’s life depends on him changes things. He knows he has to find the missing baby girl. Because if he doesn’t, he fears there’s a chance everyone will give up the baby for dead, just like they did before…
About the book
I would like to thank NetGalley and the author for my ARC in exchange for an honest review. Obviously I read it in English.
In Kelly’s Forge, a tiny abandoned Irish village, a cyclist finds the body of a young woman. The detective in charge of the case, Beck, from the neighboring town, sees a child seat in the woman’s car but no child. Has the child been kidnapped? Or was she killed like her mother? What happened to her?
The detective’s name sounds so strange to me, every time I read it I’m expecting a woman. I like the idea of the story, I like the fact that a little girl disappears, the fact that she is connected to an old case that has not been properly investigated and how they connect. I didn’t notice that this book was the second volume. Otherwise I wouldn’t have read it. Not because I didn’t like it, but simply because I read in chronological order. But I must say that I had no problem reading it even though it is very likely there are references to the first book that I did not fully understand.
