every secret thing

every secret thing
laura lippman
fiction/mystery
william morrow
published 2003

Two little girls banished from a neighborhood birthday party take a wrong turn down an unfamiliar Baltimore street and encounter an abandoned stroller with an infant inside.  What happens next is shocking and terrible, and three families are irreparably destroyed.  

Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from "kid prison" to begin their lives over again.  But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police - all the adults in Alice and Ronnie's lives.  And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances.

There was hardly a redeemable character in this book.  Alice and Ronnie, Alice's mother, her defense attorney, the young reporter, even the baby's mother.  None had qualities I found I could relate to or root for.  Near the end I found myself feeling sorry for Ronnie who seemed to have been screwed over the most.  For some reason the two I disliked the most were Alice and Cynthia, the mother of the baby in the stroller.  At first it was because who leaves her baby on her front porch unattended?  Then when that was explained I still couldn't find any sympathy for her because she just seemed like such a terrible person.  And who's to say that I wouldn't react the same way she did if that were my situation?  I probably would.

I did find the detective Nancy to be a genuinely good person who kind of got the short end of the stick in her rookie days.

But all in all the book was relatively disappointing to me.  Everyone got away!  The one who deserved redemption paid the price for all the idiots.  Some things I didn't understand the point of.  Mira's character?  Annoying and unnecessary.  And then she gets rewarded in the end?  When she didn't even have a story?  It was all so pointless.  I didn't need a happy ending, but I did want a justified one.