In a book that is pure unadulterated fun, Kate Atkinson creates her second Jackson Brodie mystery (2006), featuring a series of bizarre characters, all involved with murder–either planning it, committing it, or trying to avoid it. Many seemingly unrelated characters, involved in several seemingly unrelated plot lines, make their appearance in the first fifty pages. In the main plot line, an Edinburgh automobile accident leaves “Paul Bradley,” a mysterious man and innocent victim, at the mercy of a crazed, baseball bat-wielding Honda driver. A witness, Martin Canning, the timid writer of Nina Riley mystery stories, reacts instinctively to the impending carnage, hurling his laptop at the Honda driver and saving “Paul Bradley” from certain death. A second set of characters revolves around Graham Hatter, the wealthy developer of Hatter Homes, who is in trouble for bribery, money laundering, and fraud in the building of cheap tract houses. Jackson Brodie, former cop and private investigator, in Edinburgh for a drama festival in which his girlfriend is involved, introduces a third plot line when he discovers a woman’s body on the rocks beside the ocean.
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Jackson Brodie, a former police inspector turned private investigator, is investigating three old cases, which soon begin to converge and then overlap. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared without a trace thirty-five years ago while sleeping in a tent with one of her sisters, two of whom have hired Jackson to find out what happened to her. Theo Wyre has hired him to investigate the death of his daughter Laura, his much-loved 18-year-old daughter, who was slashed and killed by a maniac ten years before while working in her father’s office. Theo, having spent ten years accumulating information, has turned over a roomful of files to Jackson. Shirley Morrison, Jackson’s third client, is trying to locate her sister and her niece. Her sister Michelle, married at eighteen and living with her husband and screaming daughter on an isolated farm, has vanished from Shirley’s life, and after twenty-five years, Shirley wants to find her. Filled with ironies and noir humor, the novel also reflects Atkinson’s astute observation of social interactions, as she skewers some aspects of her characters’ lives at the same time that she manages to create interest and even sympathy for them.
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Recovered physically but not emotionally from an accident which cost the life of his fiancée, followed by a downward spiral which led to his breaking of a superior officer’s nose, J McNee has wisely left the CID and has been working as a private investigator in his home town of Dundee, Scotland. Morose and cynical, he suffers from agonizing psychosomatic injuries which sometimes nearly paralyze him as a result of the violence of his past life. When he is asked to investigate a missing person by reporter Cameron Connolly, a wheelchair-bound man whose spine was broken by members of the local drug trade which he had been investigating, McNee takes the job, “off the books,” working in parallel with the Dundee CID. The missing person is Mary Furst, a fourteen-year-old girl, a promising student and artist, who is also the god-daughter of David Burns, a thug who is “knuckle deep in drug money, extortion, rackets, underground deals, and blackmail.”
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Lovers of Victorian Gothic mysteries will have loads of fun with this one, quite different in tone from the norm, and lovers of literary fiction will admire the author’s ability to describe and bring the period to life while also conveying important sociological and religious issues. Written by Alastair Sim, great-nephew of the famed actor of the same name, while he was still a student at the University of Glasgow, the novel takes the Victorian police procedural in new directions. Inspector Archibald Allerdyce, an emotionally damaged man who no longer believes in God, and Sergeant Hector McGillivray, even more damaged from his army experiences during the colonial rebellion in India and the Crimean War, have been ordered by the highest levels of government to solve the disappearance of William Bothwell-Scott, the Duke of Dornoch, wealthiest man in Scotland. The Duke has amassed a ten thousand-acre estate by having his thugs clear the land of long-time poor residents, also demolishing a small village near the coast which interfered with his view.
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How long has it been since you have read a novel with a thematic line so unusual and so well explicated that reading the book changed your way of seeing the world? This novel was one such experience for me. Metaphysical, historical, and utterly different from anything I have ever read, Giles Foden’s Turbulence kept me (neither a mathematician nor a student of physics) turning the pages, no matter how theoretical and dense the novel sometimes became with its science. Fascinating personal stories are interwoven with the scientific plot, giving the novel immediacy, even for a devout non-scientist. Set in London and Scotland from January through June, 1944, the novel is a study of weather forecasting and all the factors which must be considered in making long-range predictions, especially as the allies consider the D-Day invasion.
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