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CASE HISTORIES

From the jackson brodie series , vol. 1.

by Kate Atkinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 9, 2004

Wonderful fun and very moving: it’s a pleasure to see this talented writer back on form.

After two self-indulgent detours, Atkinson proves that her Whitbread Award–winning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996), was no fluke with a novel about three interconnected mysteries.

They seem totally unrelated at first to private detective Jackson Brodie, hired by separate individuals in Cambridge, England, to investigate long-dormant cases. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared from a tent in her family’s backyard in 1970; 34 years later, her sisters Amelia and Julia discover Olivia’s stuffed toy in their recently deceased father’s study and want Jackson to find out what he had to do with the disappearance. Theo Wyre’s beloved 18-year-old daughter Laura was murdered by a knife-wielding lunatic in 1994, and he too hires Jackson to crack this unsolved murder. Michelle was also 18 when she went to jail in 1979 for killing her husband with an ax while their infant daughter wailed in the playpen; she vanished after serving her time, but Shirley Morrison asks Jackson to find, not her sister Michelle, but the niece she promised to raise, then was forced to hand over to grandparents. The detective, whose bitter ex-wife uses Jackson’s profound love for their eight-year-old daughter to torture him, finds all these stories of dead and/or missing girls extremely unsettling; we learn toward the end why the subject of young women in peril is particularly painful for him. Atkinson has always been a gripping storyteller, and her complicated narrative crackles with the earthy humor, vibrant characterizations, and shrewd social observations that enlivened her first novel but were largely swamped by postmodern game-playing in Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000). Here, she crafts a compulsive page-turner that looks deep into the heart of sadness, cruelty, and loss, yet ultimately grants her charming p.i. (and most of the other appealingly offbeat characters, including one killer) a chance at happiness and some measure of reconciliation with the past.

Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004

ISBN: 0-316-74040-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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'Case Histories': Women in Trouble

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By Jacqueline Carey

• Dec. 5, 2004

CASE HISTORIES By Kate Atkinson. 312 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $23.95.

CERTAIN characters are the stock in trade of detective novels: innocent female murder victims, embittered spinsters, wives with secrets, teenage runaways, sexy old actresses and men who feel driven to try, over and over, to protect or avenge the downtrodden. Kate Atkinson's latest novel contains all these characters, which might suggest it's just another variation on a host of well-worn themes -- but, amazingly enough, this cast, as familiar as it is, still has the power to ensnare us. In fact, "Case Histories" is so exuberant, so empathetic, that it makes most murder-mystery page-turners feel as lifeless as the corpses they're strewn with.

Atkinson's work has always spilled over with humorous types, humorous exchanges and humorous asides. Also colorful metaphors, class resentments, tragic deaths, cats and dogs, restless philandering and long-lasting family estrangements. Her first novel, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum," is a rich, billowy, war-torn, oddly bifurcating family saga, half of which takes place not in the text but in notes to the text. Her most recent novel, "Emotionally Weird," features a young woman on a romantic wind-swept island who tells us a story about a furiously scribbling creative writing class. Among its many elements -- way too many elements -- is a twist in which a private eye crashes from the novel-in-the-novel into the novel itself.

"Case Histories" is much tamer and much easier to follow. There is a real mystery framework, and after teasing and toying with the reader Atkinson delivers real solutions. The emotional lives of her characters are, however, never trimmed to fit. The novel is packed with women whose appetites are large, and Atkinson's prose is correspondingly loose and louche: no single point of view predominates, and everyone's thoughts effortlessly rollick along. Even the embittered spinster isn't exactly repressed about acknowledging her repressions.

Three case histories open the book: each presents a crime that suggests an escalating degree of female culpability. In the first, a 3-year-old disappears one summer night as she sleeps in a tent next to one of her older sisters. (Complete innocence.) In the next, a teenager is stabbed as she helps out in her widowed father's law office. (She's not a virgin, so possibly she brought it on herself? Was there a connection between her and her unknown assailant?) In the final crime, a husband is felled by an ax during an argument with his wife. (Complete guilt; inexplicable silence from the accused.) Of course, nothing is as it seems.

After these cases are presented, we are introduced to Jackson Brodie, a cop turned private investigator. It is many years after the crimes have been committed, and he seems to have no connection to any of them. Instead, we learn that Jackson has been hired by a jealous husband to follow his flight-attendant wife, whom he suspects of cheating on him. Although this subplot turns out to be a red herring, it eases us into Jackson's -- and Atkinson's -- eccentric style.

Sitting in his secondhand Alfa Romeo, waiting for the flight attendant to emerge from her house, Jackson broods about cars: the Volvo his ex-wife drives, the old BMW his daughter was conceived in, the BMW Z3 that belongs to the curvy dentist he fancies. Then the flight attendant shoots into view. Despite the tediousness of her life and despite the fact that she doesn't know she's being watched, she rockets off in what Jackson describes as her "girly" Ford Ka. In the weeks that he's been following her, Jackson has often been tempted to pull her over -- when he hasn't suddenly lost her.

It's a good blueprint for the rest of the book. Eventually, Jackson is consulted about the three old crimes, and as he ricochets among the concerns of his new clients he finds himself hanging on for dear life, not so much a professional investigator as a man barely keeping up with events. But he does, and with such irritable gusto that we come to love him for it.

The women in "Case Histories" all seem to want to get into trouble -- not because they're self-defeating, because they're living at top speed. They're hungry, generous, robust and impetuous. Consider, for example, the wife with a secret: one minute she's looking at some strawberry jam at a country fair and the next she's amorously bent over an old wooden drainboard with a local landowner, who happens to be a complete stranger.

Too often in mystery novels, the detective moans about how he must protect the weak and vulnerable -- the female. In Atkinson's all-embracing book, Jackson feels more than sympathy for the many women around him; he identifies with them in an offhand and therefore convincing way. Reacting to the taunts of an old army buddy ("You're such a policeman, Jackson"), he mildly observes: "Yeah, I know. I'm a policeman, I've turned into a woman . . . and I carry an organ-donor card. It's called middle age."

Despite the magic realist aspects of Atkinson's previous work, her talents -- especially her knack for spinning tales within tales -- are particularly well suited to the detective form. And

in "Case Histories," she's clearly not chafing at the discipline imposed by this structure. In fact, it serves to keep in check what in her other books could seem an excessive self-consciousness. You can start this one knowing that it will have a mystery's satisfying shape -- and also knowing that none of Atkinson's dramatic range will be sacrificed to it.

Although solutions and surprises abound, in "Case Histories" Atkinson is less interested in detailing the steps of an investigation than in exploring the rough and tumble that happens along the way. Her humor -- and she is a very funny writer -- is the sort that comes from being able to see the way happiness and sadness can emerge from the same situation. Her reach is certainly long enough to touch cruelty and grief, but it also extends far in the opposite direction -- all the way to joy.

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Case Histories

Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum , beat out Salman Rushdie for the 1995 Whitbread Award, an endorsement of her sure hand in depicting the peculiar cast of life in her native Yorkshire. She seems to have taken the vote of confidence as encouragement to experiment. In her last book, Not the End of the World , her plaything was magic realism. Here in Case Histories , it’s the detective novel, and it gets the better of her (not by much, but still). Three unrelated murder cases come under the scrutiny of private investigator Jackson Brodie, a man whose quirks are only slightly less predictable than his canniest pensées: “The entire world consisted of one accounting sheet—lost on the left-hand side, found on the right. Unfortunately the two never balanced.” Some of the other characters are more fully turned out, and the multipronged plot is ingeniously tied up. But in the end this is a clever detective novel, no less but no more.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. Little, Brown. 312 Pages. $23.95.

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Book Review: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

By: Author Jen - MMB Book Blog

Posted on Published: 29 June 2024  - Last updated: 22 September 2024

Case Histories is the first book in the Jackson Brodie series by Kate Atkinson.

The Jackson Brodie series follows the life and investigations of a former police inspector turned private investigator, Jackson Brodie. Each novel delves into intricate mysteries, exploring Brodie’s complex character as he navigates through cases that intertwine with his personal life.

Disclosure : This post may include affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases

Jackson Brodie: Book One Genre: Crime Author: Kate Atkinson Buy: Amazon | Waterstones Published: 2004

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 . . .

Case Histories Book Review: My Opinion

I really enjoyed this book. Jackson Brodie, the central character, was immediately likeable – rough around the edges but ultimately a good person. His protective instinct and unfailing sympathy toward others reminded me a bit of Aaron Falk from Jane Harper’s novels.

Jackson’s world-weary nature and his dry sense of humour added some much-needed levity to the darker themes in the book. Atkinson doesn’t just give us a typical detective, she delves into Jackson’s personal struggles, making him feel fully human and relatable.

The other characters were all well-defined, and I loved how the seemingly unrelated cases slowly became intertwined. These flawed but interesting characters kept me hooked, and I had a particular soft spot for grieving father, Theo.

I did find myself particularly invested in the cases involving Amelia (the murdered young woman) and poor little Olivia (the missing toddler). I really wanted to know what had happened to them and empathised with the family members left behind. However, I was less emotionally invested in the story involving the new mother who murdered her husband.

The pacing can feel a bit meandering at times as Kate Atkinson takes the time to explore each character’s backstory in depth. I personally enjoyed the slower pace as I’d take a character-driven novel over a fast-paced thriller any day.

What I really enjoyed about this book is that it’s more than just a mystery. It’s an insightful look at grief, loss, and how past traumas shape our present.

I’m definitely looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

What to read next

I’d definitely recommend continuing with the rest of the Jackson Brodie series. The next book in the series is titled One Good Turn.

This book is featured on the following list:

Complete List of Kate Atkinson Books in Order 2024

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Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson

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"His daughter was murdered 10 years ago and he can't get over it." "Why should he?" Offhand as it is, the question that the beggar Lily-Rose asks Jackson Brodie the private investigator is fundamental to this novel, as to all Kate Atkinson's fiction. Case Histories shows Atkinson preoccupied as ever with families and time. "Writing," she has been quoted as saying, "is the act of rescuing the past."

History, for Atkinson, consists of more history. In this, her fourth novel, the contemporary action is delayed by three flashbacks, to 1970, 1994 and 1979. In the first, Olivia Land, aged three, lies in bed in a room previously occupied in turn by Sylvia, Amelia and Julia, her older sisters. Mentioning them, Atkinson has to introduce their parents, Rosemary and Victor, and say how they came to marry though Victor was twice as old as his bride; and to explain that requires Victor's own history, including his mother's committal to a lunatic asylum in 1924.

Devotees of private-eye novels should be warned. This isn't one; not really. Jackson Brodie is certainly an authentic character: ex-policeman, ex-soldier, with a case history of his own, a beloved daughter, and tragic skeletons rattling in his head. He has a failed marriage, an overdeveloped sense of justice and an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation. But the momentum of the book, this continual sliding and tumbling backwards in time, rather debilitates the framing narrative. Jackson proceeds at a shuffle, pondering and blinking bemusedly at the incidental attempts on his life.

Also on Jackson's case-list are an air hostess suspected of adultery; the sister of a convicted killer attempting to locate a niece; and the man obsessed with the death of his daughter. Theo Wyre, a fat solicitor, is fat because Laura Wyre is dead. Theo has a desperate need to nurture, and now there's only himself to feed. Laura is dead because she was working in Theo's office the day a stranger in a yellow golfing jersey pulled out a knife. She had taken the job because she loved her dad; and her dad had wanted to protect her. All these bits of history Atkinson tells us with her customary emotional candour. The history of the man with the knife is, if you like, what she needs Jackson Brodie for.

Atkinson is always perceptive and engaging, and this time perhaps a degree less antic in her postmodern playfulness. Literary references - to Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton or Jilly Cooper - are still plentiful. Shakespeare pops up, as usual. No character in an Atkinson novel can hear the word "convent" without thinking "Get thee to a nunnery". But as the book goes on, there seem to be fewer of these fidgety parentheses, and a new and welcome sense of calm and assurance that it's tempting, if presumptuous, to identify with maturity.

The reviewer's latest novel is 'Finding Helen' (Black Swan)

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• About the Book

With a trio of compelling "cold case" mysteries at its core; with its wonderfully sympathetic and complex private detective hero; with its host of instantly endearing, lovably flawed characters; and with its effortlessly beautiful and intelligent prose, Case Histories is Kate Atkinson's breakout book - the most accomplished, most compulsively readable novel yet from a writer of the first rank.

CASE ONE: Olivia Land, youngest and most beloved of the Land girls, goes missing in the night and is never seen again. Thirty years later, two of her surviving sisters, each achingly lonely in her own way, reunite when their cruel and distant father dies. There, among the clutter of their childhood home, they unearth a shocking clue to Olivia's disappearance.

CASE TWO: All of Theo's happiness is tied to his devoted daughter Laura. He delights in her wit, her effortless beauty, her selfless love, and in the fact that she's taken a position at his prestigious law firm. But on her first day on the job, a maniac storms into the office and turns Theo's entire world upside down.

CASE THREE Michelle looks around one day and finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making. A very needy baby and a very demanding husband make her every waking moment a reminder that somewhere, somehow, she made a grave mistake and will spend the rest of her life paying for it-until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.

As Private Detective Jackson Brodie investigates all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge. Jackson finds himself inextricably caught up in his clients' lives; their grief, their joy, their desire, and their unshakable need for resolution are very much like his own.

Kate Atkinson's celebrated talent makes for a novel that positively sparkles with surprise, comedy, tragedy, and constant, page-turning delight.  

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

• Publication Date: October 17, 2005
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• ISBN-10: 0316010707
• ISBN-13: 9780316010702
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She Reads Novels

"she had read novels while other people perused the sunday papers" – mary elizabeth braddon, case histories by kate atkinson.

In Case Histories , private detective Jackson Brodie is investigating three old cases that have remained unresolved for years:

Case History No. 1 – During the summer heatwave of 1970, three-year-old Olivia Land is sleeping in a tent in the garden with her older sister, Amelia. When Amelia wakes up, she finds that Olivia has disappeared without trace.

Case History No. 2 – In 1994, eighteen-year-old Laura Wyre is murdered on her first day working in her father’s office. Her killer has still not been found and no motive for the attack has ever been discovered.

Case History No. 3 – In 1979, Michelle Fletcher is living on an isolated farm with her new husband and baby daughter. Depressed, lonely and finding it hard to cope, an argument with her husband ends in a brutal murder.

The connection between these three stories is Jackson Brodie, who is contacted by family members hoping to have the cases reopened or looked at again. Amelia and Julia Land want to find out what happened to their little sister, Olivia, and whether she could still be alive; Laura’s father, Theo, wants to know who killed his beloved daughter and why; and Shirley Morrison is searching for her sister Michelle’s daughter, with whom she lost contact after the incident which tore their family apart. But Jackson has problems of his own and as he begins to investigate these three very different crimes, he is reminded of a tragedy in his own past and another ‘lost girl’ who disappeared from his life decades earlier.

I loved Case Histories . I know describing a book as unputdownable is a cliché, but it was true in this case – it really is the sort of book where once you start reading, you don’t want to stop until you reach the end. It’s a crime novel I would recommend even to readers who are not really interested in crime fiction because, while the three mysteries are quite interesting, the real strength of the book is in the characterisation. The story is not so much about the crimes themselves as about the effect they had on the people involved and how they have tried (and often failed) to move on from what has happened.

I liked Jackson and am looking forward to meeting him again in the rest of the series, but my favourites in this book were Amelia and Theo. Amelia, who is approaching middle age feeling friendless and unwanted, has invented an imaginary boyfriend to brighten up her non-existent social life, and Theo, for whom his daughter was the centre of his universe, is neglecting his health while he devotes his life to finding her killer, drawing up colour-coded charts of her friends and teachers and making yearly pilgrimages to the scene of her death. Their lives are sad, lonely and tragic, yet Atkinson injects just enough humour into their stories to turn them into characters who are amusing but not ridiculous, flawed but sympathetic.

I also thought the structure of the book was interesting, because the timeline is not entirely linear. We see events from one perspective in one chapter, then in the next chapter we go back several hours, days or weeks to see those same events from another character’s perspective, filling in gaps and adding to our knowledge of what is going on. Two of the case histories – Olivia’s disappearance and Laura’s murder – worked very well alongside each other, but the third one, involving Michelle and her sister, felt disconnected from the others and didn’t work quite as well. I think I had expected all three cases to be much more closely linked than they actually were and I was disappointed that they weren’t.

At the end of the book, after Jackson is sure he’s solved the crimes, there are still more twists to come. We are given enough information throughout the story so that we can guess at what may have happened and work out some parts of the mystery, but the final pieces of the puzzle are withheld from us until the very end.

That’s two Kate Atkinson books read and two enjoyed; now I can’t wait to read the second book in the Jackson Brodie series, One Good Turn .

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24 thoughts on “ case histories by kate atkinson ”.

Two of the case histories – Olivia’s disappearance and Laura’s murder – worked very well alongside each other, but the third one, involving Michelle and her sister, felt disconnected from the others and didn’t work quite as well. I think I had expected all three cases to be much more closely linked than they actually were and I was disappointed that they weren’t.

I think it’s primarily for this reason that I’m the only person on the planet who was unimpressed by Case Histories . I thought the TV-movie adaptation did a marginally better job of tying everything together, although it had its problems too.

Sorry you didn’t like it. I think I was just so engrossed in the lives of the characters I was able to overlook any problems with the plot.

Oh I haven’t read any book by this author, but this one happens to be in the public library, and I have picked it up several times and put it in its place again because I thought it was a short stories compilation. I saw your link on twitter by chance, and now I’m really looking forward to borrowing it 😀

It does sound like a short story compilation, but it isn’t! I hope you enjoy it. I’m going to start the second one in the series soon.

I’ll keep an eye on your upcoming review 😉

I have been meaning to read something by Atkinson for forever. And I have been in doubt about this series, because I am not a crime reader. But you’ve convinced me: I should definitely give these a try.

I don’t read a lot of crime either, but I really enjoyed this book. It’s so much more than just a crime novel!

I loved Case Histories when I read it some years ago, loved the other Jackson books too, but somehow just don’t fancy Life after Life.

I loved Life After Life, though it’s a very different type of book from Case Histories. I’m looking forward to reading the other Jackson books – I was lucky enough to find One Good Turn in the library yesterday!

Like you, I’ve read Life After Life and think it is wonderful. I’ve been looking forward to reading more of her so thank you for this. Did you know that Atkinson may be writing another novel from the viewpoint of the brother of the woman in Life After Life?

I had heard that there was probably going to be a sequel, but I didn’t know it would be from the brother’s point of view. That should be interesting – I’m looking forward to it.

This didn’t quite work for me, either – but I know part of the problem was reading it too soon after Life After Life. I have her books in mind to try again later.

I really enjoyed this one but I can see that it might have suffered from being read too soon after Life After Life. I probably did the right thing in waiting a while before trying another of her books.

I loved Kate Atkinson’s early books and I was a little worried when I saw she was writing crime fiction, but I quickly realised I shouldn’t have been. I loved it and I am so glad that you did too.

I’m pleased you loved this one too. I’m planning to read the rest of the Jackson Brodie series first and then go back to her earlier books.

Sadly I have still not read anything by Kate Atkinson. I would like to though and I like the sound of this crime series. Glad you enjoyed it.

This might be a good Kate Atkinson book to start with, though I did love Life After Life as well.

I first read Atkinson with a very bad Portuguese translation of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which put me off her for many years, until I started blogging. Everyone praised her so much that I decided to give her another shot and picked up Case Histories last year. Also loved it and am determined to read much more by her. Did you know there’s a TV adaptation?

I can see how a bad translation could put you off an author, but I’m glad you gave her another chance. I haven’t seen the TV adaptation but I would like to now that I’ve started reading the series.

I’m so glad to read you loved this one, I love the Jackson Brodie series and I would recommend reading them all. I think my favourite was When Will There Be Good News? I hope she writes some more one day. Happy New Year too. Lindsay

One Good Turn is on my library pile so I’ll be starting it soon, but I’m pleased to hear I can look forward to reading When Will There Be Good News as well.

I’m glad you ventured into the Jackson Brodie books. They make for very different crime reading I think.

And what is so interesting is the contrast between these and the wonderful Life after Life. I am so looking forward to reading her new novel.

This is not a conventional crime novel and I think that’s why I liked it so much. I’ll be reading the rest of the series, but I’m looking forward to her new novel as well.

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