Book Review - Little Face by Sophie Hannah

Synopsis:  It's every mother's nightmare ...

The first time Alice Fancourt goes out after their daughter is born, she leaves the two-week-old infant with her husband, David.  When she returns only two hours later, she swears the baby in the crib is not her child.  Despite her distress, David is adamant that she is wrong.

The police are called to the scene.  Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse is sympathetic, but he doubts Alice's story.  His superior, Sergeant Charlie Zailer, thinks that Alice must be suffering from some sort of delusion brought on by postpartum depressions.

With an increasingly hostile and menacing David swearing she must either be mad or lying, how can Alice make the police believe her before it's too late?

First Line:  "I am outside."

Random Quote:  "Finally a sliver of hope.  Maybe I can talk him round, persuade him to help me, no matter what sneery Sergeant Zailer says."

Review:  I really like Sophie Hannah's third book, The Wrong Mother, so I was looking forward to reading this one (her first) and was sorely disappointed.  This book was so disappointing that it made me wonder if I should rethink how much I liked The Wrong Mother.

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Hannah alternates chapters between first-person narrative of the protagonist and third-person narrative of the cops.  In The Wrong Mother this works really well, but in this book it feels too much like a device (which, of course, it is in both books).  In thinking through this I believe the heart of the problem here is in the rather poorly cobbled together characterizations; they just don't seem substantial or even internally consistent and this makes their actions ultimately unbelievable and mildly bland and predictable in a Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip kind of way.  There is a terrible waste of a really interesting premise here and an even more terrible waste of some good writing that's buried in here along with all the clumsiness.

I'm reading Hannah's second book and will decide how I feel about her then, but at this point I'm feeling dubious and sort of jipped.