Maternal Instinct.

Say something nasty about a child -- even if it's true, and even if it's your own child -- and there's hell to pay. Geraldine Bretherick, a stay-at-home mom, does that very thing in Sophie Hannah's new psychological-suspense thriller, THE WRONG MOTHER (Penguin, paper, $15), and sure enough, she's dead before the story starts. Hannah also wrote persuasively about modern women who buckle under the stress of motherhood in ''Little Face,'' but characters in that novel felt compassion for the young mother who insisted that someone had switched newborns on her. Here, everyone hates Geraldine and recoils from the sentiments that come to light in her journal. ''There's a 'conspiracy of silence' about what motherhood is really like,'' she wrote, between her fierce and funny rants against manipulative children who torment their exhausted mothers. No wonder the police are easily persuaded that Geraldine killed herself after drowning her daughter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]