A review by em_beddedinbooks
A Room Swept White by Sophie Hannah

3.0

this is typical Sophie Hannah - dark psychological mystery with prominent female characters, and too many twists and turns to really identify the perp before the very last page. In this book she has dealt with a gruesome topic - that of mothers killing their infants. This story deals with 3 mothers who were imprisoned for killing their offsprings (one is not a mother, but a lady who is supposed to have smothered her friend's infant) and the media struggle for their release as a few people believe that they are innocent and what happened was just crib death. The antagonist is a female doctor who is responsible for their imprisonment via her testimony. Now the women are let out after a few years of imprisonment and a media circus is going on regarding their guilt/ innocence. The readers are kept in tenterhooks till the last and there are a few murders in between with bizarre clue. And central to it is a young investigative journalist (by force, not by choice) and a team of police officers who are quite antagonistic to each other investigating the recent murders. It was interesting but with a tendency to drag a bit in the middle. I give it only 3 stars because the subject matter made me ill at ease. Thank God, I did not come across such a book when my son was in his infancy. I would never have had a good nights' sleep.