When we first meet him in Case Histories (2004), he is a veteran of the military police and then of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, where he spent twelve years, rising to detective inspector. A girl saying, ‘You want coffee?’ The littlest thing could change your life forever.”įilled with acute psychological portraits, characters who are real and sympathetic, even at their most odious suffused by tragedy – violence, murder, child molestation, incest – and yet written with such rich exuberance and sly wit that even the most horrifying incident crackles with energy and imagination, these books are messy, funny, and bittersweet – just like life.Īt the heart of the Jackson Brodie books is, of course, Jackson Brodie.
“A man stepping off the pavement in front of your car. “The littlest thing,” a character thinks in One Good Turn (2006).
It is to demonstrate how fragile our lives are, how they can turn on a dime. None of this wizardry is meant to show off how clever the author is.
Secrets abound, not only in the plot, but in what Atkinson chooses to reveal, and when. Puzzles are laid out for us, only to be discovered to be something else entirely. Plotlines converge, separate, converge again.
Balls are thrown in the air and juggled in increasingly complex patterns. Kate Atkinson has written several books since her first novel in 1995, but the eight that could be considered crime or suspense fiction – five featuring the grumpy, anxious, large-hearted detective Jackson Brodie, and three centered around World War II – are constructed in remarkable fashion. And that’s what a book is: You’re creating order out of chaos.īut what astonishing order! What splendid chaos!” “Life is creating order out of chaos on a daily basis.
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