Reading: Started Early, Took My Dog

The fourth and last* of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie crime novels takes Jackson back to his native Yorkshire. He is house-hunting and carrying out a fairly desultory investigation on behalf of a client in New Zealand who wants to find out more about her biological parents when he somehow finds himself mixed up with a 35-year-old murder. Meanwhile, retired detective superintendent Tracy Waterhouse, who was one of the first officers on the scene at that case, finds herself becoming the primary carer for a small child in rather unusual circumstances; over the course of a few days her story and Jackson's circle around each other without ever quite intersecting, building up a story about missing children, absent parents, families, responsibility and corruption. As so often in Atkinson's books, none of the characters sees the full picture; that's reserved for the readers, and even we have to work for it. There's nothing extraneous in this book, but all too often the significance of a detail only becomes apparent a hundred pages later and I found I had to keep flipping back to check things that I hadn't really paid attention to at the time. (Atkinson is a one-woman argument against ebooks.) I liked this a lot, and if I didn't like it quite as much as When Will There Be Good News?, that's only because I found Tracy a less engaging secondary protagonist than Reggie. The only trouble is that, having started to read so much more, I have now read everything Atkinson has published and will have to wait and hope that she will have a new book out soon.

*at least for now