Give Me the Child by Mel McGrath - review

Can children be evil? Is violent or antisocial behaviour genetic, learned or both? These are just two of the questions Mel McGrath, raises in this gripping grip-lit thriller about a woman whose world starts falling apart when she discovers her husband has had a love child. Dr Cat Lupo runs a clinic specialising in child personality disorders. She is married to video games designer Tom, and they have an 11-year-old daughter, Freya. Out of the blue one night the police arrive at their house with another 11-year-old girl called Ruby, whose mother has just died. Tom, it appears, is the girl’s father and he must now take at least temporary custody of her.

We learn that during Cat’s pregnancy, achieved after two fraught rounds of IVF, she had a prenatal psychotic breakdown and was hospitalised. After one of his hospital visits Tom had stopped off in a nearby pub, accidentally got drunk, chatted up a woman at the bar and ended up “in some shabby B&B around the back of Denmark Hill station”, where Ruby was conceived. Tom had never confessed.

Now Cat, while trying to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity and the bald fact that their failure to conceive a second time — diagnosed as “biological incompatibility” — was obviously her fault, does her best to make Ruby feel welcome. Could Ruby be the second child Cat has longed for? But there is something unsettling about the girl’s behaviour and the effect it starts having on Freya. Could Freya be in danger? There is also, Cat starts thinking, something fishy about the way Ruby’s mother died — in her flat on the local housing estate.

The marriage is showing signs of strain. Tom tells Cat she is being neurotic, but he’s clearly also lying to her. Cat knows she’s onto something but with her own dodgy mental history she has to tread carefully.

She is also having to make ethically difficult decisions at work, especially about how to treat a boy who has a tendency to flush kittens down the lavatory, as he may go on to do something worse. “For all the advances we’ve made in understanding the human brain, there is still no scan for the human soul,” Cat concludes. She is nowhere nearer the truth, either about him or her stepdaughter, in spite of all the lavishly funded research. It’s not surprising then that she starts reaching, perhaps unwisely, for another glass of pinot grigio.

Set in London during the 2011 Tottenham riots, Give Me the Child ticks all the standard domestic noir boxes, with its themes of infidelity, lying, mental abuse and gaslighting. But it’s so much more intelligent and skilfully written than most of what’s comparably in the bookshops, as you would expect from McGrath, an experienced journalist and novelist, who wrote so engagingly about her grandparents in her 2002 memoir, Silvertown. In Cat Lupo, she has created a brilliantly believable and empathetic character who, with her mental instability and unshakeable gut instinct, reminded me of Carrie Mathison from Homeland. More please.

£9.99, Amazon, Buy it now