Baby envy gets out of hand in The Day I Lost You, Ruth Mancini's dexterously plotted sophomore thriller. At its heart is a vexing practical question: Whose baby is it?
As the novel begins, Lauren Hopwood, an Englishwoman living in a Spanish fishing town, finds two policemen at her door: "We've come about a missing child.... An English child," one cop tells her. Lauren says she knows nothing about a missing kid and that the toddler sleeping in the bedroom is her son--and she has the birth certificate and passport to prove it. Regardless, the cop tells her that "the police in the UK were given your name by his parents, who say that fifteen months ago, you abducted their child from their home in England." Not long after the cops leave, Lauren and the toddler hightail it out of town. What happened seems obvious. But is it?
The novel hops back in time one year, when Hope Dunsmore, the Englishwoman claiming that Lauren kidnapped her child, takes up the point of view, after which the book continues to jump chronologically backward, alternating between Lauren's and Hope's perspectives until Hope's husband finally weighs in. Although everyone's voice sounds alike, the three different viewpoints afford the pleasures of watching a hypothetical three-sided tennis match. The Day I Lost You finds its three central characters at least thinking about doing the right thing; meanwhile, Mancini (The Woman on the Ledge), a lawyer, uses her expertise to show that morality and the law aren't always natural allies. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer