I saved this book up for a recent hospital stay, knowing that if it was anything like the previous Jackson Brodie novels, it would keep the boredom entirely at bay.
This is the fifth in Kate Atkinson’s series, which follows Jackson – an ex police and ex army officer, and now private detective – as he finds himself again embroiled in a series of unfortunate events, and navigates relationships with his exes, children and random strangers. As I re-read this, I realise that it sounds awful. But please believe me that it’s not – Jackson is, while entirely imperfect, a more sympathetic character than he sounds.
But the delight in these books is more the cast of other characters, whose stories weave tighter around each other with each passing chapter. Atkinson has an uncanny ability to draw you into a character immediately. It’s like watching her characters’ thoughts in real time – a stream of consciousness tale of hidden opinions, distant memories and errands they need to run. They’re certainly not always likeable, but maybe more understandable.
Like the previous books in the series, just as Atkinson has you deeply immersed in.a character and what’s happening with them, we switch to another. The jarring sense of interruption lasts less than a page, before you find yourself swept up with the next character, and eventually figuring out how the whole story fits together.
While these are Jackson Brodie novels, it’s never really felt like it’s about him alone. In Big Sky, he seemed like a side character at times. It feels somewhat fitting – you can almost picture Jackson’s weary bemusement if he were to read his own series and find himself sidelined by a series of determined women.
In this book we find Jackson fumbling his way through his relationship with his now teenage son, as well as meeting some other new characters and old acquaintances that you’d recognise from previous books:
- a beautiful trophy bride who has made her marriage a lifeline away from poverty, and is determined to keep it that way
- a bewildered middle aged man whose life has fallen away from him
- a police detective who ends up uncovering an entirely different crime to the one she’d begun investigating.
Like the other books, it’s sardonically funny, but gosh it’s also grim. The crimes uncovered in this book are sordid and depressing. It’s certainly not happy endings all around. Jackson also struck me as older and grouchier – he’s a different Jackson to the one we met in Case Histories, but I think he’s a logical extension.
Overall for me this was a big tick, and very successfully did the job of keeping me entertained for several days.
