Finished reading: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson 📚
I mentioned in the last books post that I’ve seen the Jackson Brodie TV series. Well, maybe not all of them. I enjoyed the latest book in the series so much that I thought I’d go back and read the earlier ones. This is the first, and the story was completely unfamiliar to me.
It was also surprisingly horrific. It starts by setting up three ‘case histories’, with three stories of crimes at different times in the past: a young girl disappears; a young woman is murdered; another young woman murders her husband.
Then we’re introduced to Jackson Brodie: divorced and trying to co-parent a young daughter and carry on his life, while also trying to run a private detective agency in Cambridge, a city he hates.
Somehow, all these cases are going to come together and get solved. As I said about the latest book, though, it’s clear that Atkinson’s writing about the minutiae of the human heart, far more than the minutiae of detective work. And that’s OK.
It’s an enjoyable, easy read — well, apart from the gruesomeness and tension of the first three chapters — and intriguingly it ends as if Brodie’s career is over. I don’t know if she planned to write sequels, but clearly something must change.
Books 2024, 16