Review: Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson

In Atkinson's fourth novel, main character and police officer-turned private detective Jackson Brodie investigates three London crimes while simultaneously trying to cope with the mystery his own life has become. His first case, involving the decades-old question of a missing preschooler, brings him into contact with the missing girl's three sisters, each one seemingly crazier and more emotionally warped than the next. The second, the unsolved murder of a local college student working her first day in her father's office, brought to him by a lonely and morbidly obese father obsessed with his youngest daughter's fate. His third job is more peripheral, involving a woman looking for her neice, whose mother is her convicted-murderer sister, and seems at first minor, but in the end provides a link tying the entire group together into one ugly package.

I don't usually read mystery fiction, partly because I'm impatient, and partly because it's rare that a novel can keep its cards close at hand enough for me to not know what's happening halfway through the book. Both instances leave me frustrated and annoyed. Case Histories, however, does manage to keep many of its secrets hidden until the last few chapters, and one in particular is a doozy. The reader knows from the beginning that, of course, these cases will be linked in some manner, so the discovery of the common thread isn't a surprise, and is in fact fairly obvious about 2/3 of the way through; it's the revelation of what happened to little Olivia, and the final take on the missing-neice situation, which has nothing to do with the neice at all, that are really the main attactions of the book.

Aside from the secrecy, another reason to enjoy the book is its partially-unsolved ending. There are a few strings left dangling, one in particular that could potentially come back to bite Bodie at a time when we are not there to learn of it. This left me thinking, considering what may come.

Luckily, there is another novel - One Good Turn - that will perhaps resolve the dangling pieces from Histories, in addition to introducing more.

Rating: four out of five stars - Increasingly interesting and likable characters, compelling secrets