cover image No Child of Mine

No Child of Mine

Susan Lewis. Ballantine, $15 trade paper (576p) ISBN 978-0-345-54775-0

In Lewis's new novel a relentless social worker assigns herself a mysterious case of a three-year old with a pedophilic father. After child-protective services in England receive multiple calls from an unidentified source concerning the welfare of a little girl, Alex Lake volunteers to investigate. But after discovering that the father, the deputy head of a local primary school, is less than willing to comply with requests to bring his daughter to a playgroup, schedule a pediatric appointment, and accompany his agoraphobic wife to a psychiatric evaluation, the signs of an abusive home emerge. Lake is forced to proceed with deep caution as she ousts the cunning headmaster. The novel is poorly written with unimaginative sentence structure. This is five-hundred pages of repetitive information that could have been trimmed down to fifty%E2%80%94a novella disguised as a novel. The presentation is synthetic. Lewis has published a work filled with stock characters, a tale better suited for television drama. (May)