Case Histories: A Novel [Mass Market Paperback]

Kate Atkinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night.

Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac's apparently random attack.

Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making - with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband - until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.

Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigator Jackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge . . .

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Private detective Jackson Brodie finds himself entangled in three distinctly different cases only to thread the needle time and again and come across remarkable connections between them. Susan Jameson delivers an absolutely stunning performance; her classically trained voice is perfect for Atkinsons prose and the shifting point-of-view narration. Though the lead protagonist is male, listeners will never question Jamesons abilities; she brings raw emotion to this tale and her British dialect also gives the story a vintage mystery feel. As Brodie, Jameson is simply flawless, delivering her words firmly and with resoluteness. Hers is a performance that demands repeated listens. A Back Bay paperback (Reviews, Oct. 25, 2004). (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics on the other side of the Atlantic love Atkinson; Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread Prize. To Americans’ delight, Case Histories has made the great leap. The novel is not your typical crime genre fare (that is why we placed it within our literary reviews); it’s also a series of family sagas with strong moral frameworks. Atkinson delineates each character with great empathy and depth, revealing his or her motivations, flaws, and healing. She sprinkles her trademark postmodern literary references throughout the book, but this time she’s toned them down, a sign of maturity. The four alternating points of view and framing device create a somewhat labyrinthine situation, and careful readers may pick up clues before they’re supposed to. Minor flaws, really; Case Histories is that "unisex, hard-to-put-down" kind of book (Chicago Sun-Times).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Reprint edition (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316033480
• ISBN-13: 978-0316033480
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1 x 6.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (294 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kate Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Award. She has been a critically acclaimed, bestselling author ever since, with over one million copies of her books in print in the United States.

She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, and Started Early, Took My Dog. Case Histories, which introduced her readers to Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, was made into a television series starring Jason Isaacs.

Kate Atkinson lives in Edinburgh.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#84 Overall (See top 100 authors)

#5 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical

#5 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#7 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#10 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#18 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery

#5 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical

#5 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#7 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#10 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#18 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

116 of 118 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly enjoyable. October 29, 2004

By Maggie Smith

Format:Hardcover

This is my first venture at Atkinson, and I have to say she's a delightful writer to read. She really knows how to hook you.

The story opens with the accounts of three crimes from the perspectives of those who were there at the time. Then, in the present, we meet private investigator Jackson Brodie (a former police inspector) who is dealing with his painful divorce, serious dental problems, and his ever-maturing eight-year-old daughter. Jackson's perspective guides the rest of the narrative through new leads in the three cases, and it isn't long before all three cases are entwined via their connection with Jackson.

While this sounds like a stock mystery novel or something straight off a British crime drama, Atkinson's style offers a little more than the standard mystery fare. She leaps one perspective to another with admirable grace, always managing to keep the many characters and their intertwining narratives totally distinct and completely engrossing.

My only qualms with the story had to do with the plot itself: it's pretty easy to pick up the clues Atkinson drops, and thus, figure out the conclusion well before the ending; and as for the ending--it wasn't as satisfying as it could have been. But her writing is so fluid, by turns funny and poingant, that I couldn't put it down.

94 of 98 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful novel, filled with irony and mordant wit. December 11, 2004

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Jackson Brodie, a private detective, is investigating three old cases, which soon begin to converge and overlap. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared without a trace thirty-five years ago while sleeping outside with one of her sisters, two of whom have hired Jackson to find out what happened. Theo Wyre has hired him to investigate the death of his daughter Laura Wyre, who was killed by a maniac ten years before while working in her father's office. Shirley Morrison, Jackson's third client, is trying to locate her sister and her niece. Her sister Michelle, living with her husband and young daughter on an isolated farm, has vanished from Shirley's life, and after twenty-five years, Shirley wants to find her.

Atkinson's suspenseful and dramatic cases pique the reader's interest in the characters and their lives, especially the female characters. Most have faced traumatic events and suffered through less than ideal childhoods, which unfold inexorably as the cases become more complex. Not a linear narrative, the novel focuses on different characters in successive chapters, moving back and forth in time to provide background and to set up the overlaps which eventually occur. The characters are sometimes bizarre, baffling, and even unsympathetic, but they are always memorable for their behavior and their justifications for it.

Filled with ironies and noir humor, the novel also reveals Atkinson's astute observation of social interactions, as she skewers some aspects of her characters' lives while also creating sympathy for them. While the first two case histories-that of the missing Olivia and the murdered Laura-are genuinely sad and regarded overall as tragedies, the story of Michelle Fletcher, and peripherally, her sister Shirley, is much darker. Neither Michelle nor Shirley elicits much empathy after the opening chapter, but the occasional interjection of their story line stirs up the action, changes the pace, and keeps the novel from being overly melodramatic. Atkinson's eventual revelations about Michelle's life provide Atkinson with some of her best opportunities for social satire and wit.

Readers will delight in Atkinson's characterizations, and the ironies are priceless, with the biggest noir twists saved for last. Though the cases are, in fact, all "solved" by Jackson, they are not really resolved. At least five important "loose ends" regarding the perpetrators of these murders and disappearances remain, showing that even murder cases are not as "cut and dried" as one might expect. (4.5 stars) Mary Whipple

76 of 80 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but not Great July 24, 2006

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This is the first book I've read of Atkinson's, and while it's fairly entertaining, I'm not quite sure what all the hype is about. The story revolves around 30something ex-cop Jackson Brodie, who plies his private investigative skills in present-day Cambridge, England. He is called upon to look into three cases from the past, which are introduced in the three opening chapters. The first involves the disappearance of a small girl in 1970, the second involves the apparently random murder of teenage girl in 1994, and the third involves the whereabouts of a woman who killed her husband in 1979. As Jackson looks into these different blasts from the past, we also see him struggling with his personal life. Like so many fictional police and detective protagonists he's divorced and estranged from his ex-wife, and barely able to connect with his 8-year-old daughter. He also has a family secret in his past which is alluded to several times before being revealed at the end.

The cases are all quite dark, and Atkinson does a very good job of conveying the sense of sorrow and loss that surrounds each. Jackson pursues them without a lot of hope but with due diligence and as in so many procedurals, discovers threads to each that went unexplored. It's diverting enough, but many of the characters are somewhat superficial, which keeps the book from being as good as it might have been. In the first case, the father is the archetype distracted, brusque professor, each of the four sisters is a "type" (the golden child, the outgoing dramatic one, the repressed lost middle one, the weird religious one), and there's a crone who lives next door with a gazillion cats. In the third story, the murderess is a typical teenage mother with postpartum depression, and the victim is a typical dashing young man who settles down into a somewhat less dashing adulthood. Theo, the father of the victim in the second story is better developed, and a genuinely sympathetic character who still mourns the loss of his daughter. Perhaps most egregiously, we never really get to know Jackson all that well.

The chapters hopscotch between the different storylines, and the plot unravels in the manner of a good airplane or beach read. The writing is all very fluid and professional, although there's no sense of style to mark it. There's some nice bits of humor, some nice bits of human insight, a decent irony here and there. However, there are other elements that are rather clumsily handled, such as the true reason which is unveiled for the missing little girl from the first case, as well as the adult development of one of the two sisters, which is ridiculously forced. Similarly, the dark secret about Jackson's past is totally over-the-top and unnecessary, serving no real purpose in relation to his character. There's also a homeless girl who appears throughout the book whose identity should be pretty obvious very early on, and although Atkinson leaves it unspoken, it's kind of a groaner. To her credit, it's nice that she doesn't quite spell everything out and tie up every loose end in a neat bow. On the whole, it's fairly enjoyable, and I would read another set of Jackson Brodie investigations, but there's nothing particularly groundbreaking here. For a more interesting recent take on the modern British detective story, try Patrick Neate's "City of Tiny Lights."