Often what we want to know, and rarely do, is why someone carries out a crime. Life isn’t tied up all neatly with a bow on top and I would imagine it’s quite rare when investigating crime. Atkinson has a very clever way of ending her novels without all the loose ends tied up – an issue that mentioned in a negative light in a lot of her reviews. However, some of the scrapes Jackson gets into and his frustrations with the women in his life are funny, acting as light relief. Of course the investigations are serious and their subject matter is treated with care and diligence. Atkinson has a unique way of blending very dark subject matter – missing persons, sex trafficking, modern slavery – with a sarcastic sense of humour and love of literature. Each time he collects cases that seem so disparate, but eventually overlap and connect.
From the first novel Case Histories to her long awaited fifth in the series Big Sky, we are let into the world of this slightly world weary PI. The Jackson Brodie novels were the first Kate Atkinson books I bought, one at a time as they were published. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, Jackson attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected… To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet – Lost on the left, Found on the right – and the two never seem to balance. In Case Histories we’re in a Cambridge that’s sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. It’s the sort of novel you have to start rereading the minute you’ve finished it’ Guardian ‘An astonishingly complex and moving literary detective story that made me sob but also snort with laughter.
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