Finished reading: Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson 📚
I’ve read several of Kate Atkinson’s books, but never one of her Jackson Brodie detective series. This despite having seen the TV adaptations. So getting this as a birthday present was great.
We’re promised a murder mystery set against the background of a country house hosting a murder-mystery party, and that’s what we get, eventually. I really enjoyed it, but if anything I’d like her to spend more time with the titular detective.1 But we get various viewpoint characters, and really very little from Brodie’s viewpoint. Very little actual detecting, too.
Indeed, I got the impression that Atkinson doesn’t really want to be writing a detective story. Or she does, of course, but she’s so keen on multiple viewpoints and character creation — and so good at them — that those are the things she’s doing, more than writing a conventional story of a detective solving a mystery.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can tell any story you want, any way you want, and why be bound by conventions?
Books 2024, 15
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Not really titular: Brodie’s name doesn’t appear in the title, after all. ↩︎