Kate Atkinson: When Will There Be Good News?

The third and so far last in Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series, as promised. Like I wrote before, I fell in love with the first one, was a little disappointed in the second - so I was fervently hoping that book three would bring us back to the form of book one. It does and it doesn't - it is more of a linear detective story than Case Histories, but it's not as knuckle-draggingly obvious crime fiction as One Good Turn... oh,knuckle-draggingly is perhaps a bit harsh, but I mean it just by the way of comparison, you understand. When Will There Be Good News has a lot more interesting characters and delves more into human sadness, yet it doesn't measure up to Case Histories. Maybe I just can't be surprised anymore, which means that Atkinson should abandon the crime fic project and find something else to wow me with... This is still a good novel though.

It takes place a few years after One Good Turn, when both Jackson and the DCI Louise Munroe have gotten married - not to each other, mind. Jackson accidentally (in both senses of the word) turns up in Edinburgh, and is roped in by the young girl who saves his life to help her find the woman she babysits for, who has disappeared with her son. This woman lost her family in a murder when she was a child, and has heroically created a new normal life for herself. The book compares her to another woman who is a victim of domestic violence, as Munroe wonders whether it's possible to let go of such a violent start and put it behind you, as Joanna Hunter seems to have done. And so it floats along, with no terribly surprising turns but some good character description - until the very end when we get two or three great little twists, one of them slipped in almost by the by. I did like it a lot. Recommended!

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories and One Good Turn

It was completely by chance that I first saw One Good Turn at the library. I was convinced there was nothing and oh well, maybe I could get a few Agatha Christies anyway. Instead I brought home a pile of ten books, no Christies among them at all. Ha. I saw One Good Turn on the paperback shelf and thought hm, I do like Atkinson, why not? and when I read the back I saw that she'd turned to crime writing, and that this was the second one, so I got the first too and read them in order. And oh, was I impressed with Case Histories. I couldn't put it down and I cried and I cried. This is not crime fiction, this is a novel about crimes, with the red thread of the private investigator Jackson Brodie as a means to tell us the stories of several people who've met with tragedy and pain and loss, all gradually revealed as the book progresses - so that when all is told at the end we find out that some of our presumptions were wrong, altogether. If you like crime fiction at all you must read this book!

While I was reading I was thinking of what to write to convey that feeling of melancholy, the pervading sadness in the novel, but now I've read the second book and another in between so I've lost the words - just trust me, it's worth it. In contrast, the second one is more like a classic crime novel. I think Atkinson might have been playing around with the genre a bit, but I don't think it's a complete success, I'm left feeling a bit "meh" all the same. I didn't love it as much, it felt too much like Part Two, it was more obviously funny in parts, and we weren't confronted with people's personal loss as forcefully as in Case Histories - here, the murders were of people we didn't get to know, and if we did, we didn't like them. I hope the third book swings back, and I hope she doesn't get stuck in a crime series genre. I'll be reading no. 3 as soon as I can, and in the meantime I've got my fingers crossed.