Case Histories: A Novel (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this ambitious fourth novel from Whitbread winner Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum), private detective Jackson Brodie—ex-cop, ex-husband and weekend dad—takes on three cases involving past crimes that occurred in and around London. The first case introduces two middle-aged sisters who, after the death of their vile, distant father, look again into the disappearance of their beloved sister Olivia, last seen at three years old, while they were camping under the stars during an oppressive heat wave. A retired lawyer who lives only on the fumes of possible justice next enlists Jackson's aid in solving the brutal killing of his grown daughter 10 years earlier. In the third dog-eared case file, the sibling of an infamous ax-bludgeoner seeks a reunion with her niece, who as a baby was a witness to murder. Jackson's reluctant persistence heats up these cold cases and by happenstance leads him to reassess his own painful history. The humility of the extraordinary, unabashed characters is skillfully revealed with humor and surprise. Atkinson contrasts the inevitable results of family dysfunction with random fate, gracefully weaving the three stories into a denouement that taps into collective wishful thinking and suggests that warmth and safety may be found in the aftermath of blood and abandonment. Atkinson's meaty, satisfying prose will attract many eager readers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

The population of Cambridge, England, is well over 100,000, but you wouldn't think it was any larger than a sewing circle from reading Case Histories, the most recent offering from British novelist Kate Atkinson. The characters in this pensive detective thriller can't help but impinge upon one another's lives, even though they may not be aware of one another's names.

The coincidences that bind them together would be ridiculously unbelievable in almost any other kind of novel; in a mystery, they're forgivable. And in a mystery where the dead bodies turn out to be far less important to the story than the survivors who mourn them, the coincidences seem almost mystical: markers of a grand, melancholy design built from the sorrows of anyone who has ever lost a loved one and never gotten over it.

Jackson Brodie -- private detective, Francophile, divorcé, overprotective father -- tools around Cambridge tailing wives who are suspected of adultery, work that only drives home the pain of his own recently dissolved marriage. When three new cases fall into his lap -- all officially "cold," as far as the police are concerned, and all brought to Jackson by relatives of the murdered or missing -- he's grateful for the work, as well as for the opportunity to immerse himself in something other than the bad memories he can't seem to shake.

The first case, brought by a pair of perpetually squabbling sisters, involves the decades-old disappearance of their baby sister, abducted from their backyard one night and never found. Amelia and Julia Land hire Jackson after discovering in their deceased (and despised) father's belongings a favorite stuffed toy that had belonged to little Olivia, a toy she was undoubtedly carrying when she went missing. Why would he have kept it a secret so long? And why did he have it in the first place? Jackson is charged with determining once and for all what the police couldn't, and what the sisters suspect: that their father took to his grave a dark and horrible secret.

The second case is brought by Theo Wyre, a retired lawyer who has made the unsolved, 10-year-old murder of his daughter the sole obsession of his sad and solitary life. Theo asks Jackson to find the man who walked into Theo's law office and stabbed his daughter to death after asking for Theo by name, then casually walked outside and into thin air. In Theo -- overweight, lonely, unable to get on with his life -- Jackson detects some spectral future version of himself, and his willingness to take on the difficult case bespeaks his fear of turning out the same way.

Just as Jackson is unearthing the first clues that will eventually unlock both secrets, into his office walks a third client: the sister of a notorious axe murderer who took her husband's life in front of their infant daughter and then took herself "off the grid" after serving her time in prison. Jackson assumes he is being asked to find the murderess and is surprised to learn that he's not: The client wants to learn the whereabouts of the now-grown infant, her niece, who has similarly vanished off the face of the Earth.

Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won England's Whitbread Award in 1995 for its lovingly told account of a dysfunctional middle-class English family; thanks to the strength of its characters, it's still a popular choice for book clubs in America as well as in the United Kingdom. In taking on detective fiction -- a genre whose circumscribed rules don't typically allow for too much character development -- Atkinson, whose inclinations are more literary, is taking a risk. No one ever wanted to know what Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade were "feeling." What's supposed to matter is plot, plot, plot.

Judged by that standard alone, Case Histories is a noble failure. The aforementioned coincidences that tie these characters together strain, and then exhaust, credulity; and anyone who can't connect the dots on their own and figure everything out by the book's last third needs to go back to Hammett 101 for a refresher course.

But if you read the novel instead as a multifaceted character study grafted onto the detective-thriller format, it's a rousing triumph, thanks in whole to Atkinson's boundless sympathy for her funny, pathetic, three-dimensional and fully human creations. Jackson Brodie wants to be Marlowe or Spade, but his tough-guy aspirations are continually subverted by his doting-father instincts. (He's forever fretting over his young daughter's choices in music and clothing, terrified that popular culture is priming her for lasciviousness.) The Land sisters, Julia and Amelia, are, respectively, a sexually free-spirited bohemian and her exact opposite, a Victorian prude whose overdue awakening comes as both a surprise and a relief. And Theo Wyre brings new poignancy to the word "heartbroken." When his poor, overworked, undernourished heart gives out on him after a stressful walk, he draws momentary comfort from the sight of a good Samaritan whom he takes to be his dead daughter, "come to take him home."

Breaking detective-thriller form, Case Histories is told from multiple points of view, reducing the burden on Jackson to "solve" the crimes for us and letting each character bloom in the light of the author's sharp, observant prose. That's something that the genre's hard-boiled forefathers would never have done; for them, the ratiocinative novel was a one-man job, and sympathetic characters just gummed up the works. Kate Atkinson, though, seems to have intuited that the most compelling mystery of all isn't necessarily whodunit, but rather howtodealwithit.

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (October 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316010707
• ISBN-13: 978-0316010702
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (175 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #317,001 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Maggie Smith (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Case Histories: A Novel (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.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Case Histories: A Novel (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."

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Enjoyable, Well-Written Character Studies in Mystery Format, December 30, 2005

By	Miami Reader (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Case Histories: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Washington Post review has it right. You will like this novel if:
--You enjoy strikingly crafted, humorous phrases that make you applaud the writer's insights regarding the human condition.
--You like stories written in non-linear fashion, where points of view and major characters change from one chapter to the next, incidents are not always revealed in the order in which they occur, new characters suddenly enter the story for no apparent reason, and you get to use your smarts to deduce what is happening. (Fear not; all is eventually and clearly explained.)
--Several engrossing mysterious threads keep you on edge to find out what the explanations are going to be.
--"Howtodealwithit"--conflicted, troubled people trying to straighten out their lives--is as interesting to you as whodunit.

You will not like this novel if:
--You want a slam-bang action thriller with little or no introspection by the characters.
--You're turned off by major changes in story line and characters from one chapter to the next.
--You'd rather not read about incest, (occasional) casual sex, and dysfunctional families with parents who seem incapable of giving love.
--You strongly object to unlikely coincidences that tie plot elements together.

Stephen King rated this as the best novel of the year in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. I couldn't put it down. This was my first Kate Atkinson novel, and I'm going to read all of her others.

Addendum to review: Sorry to report that I did not enjoy Atkinson's earlier novels; found them tedious, difficult, slow, hard to relate to. Think twice before buying any of them.