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Summary
Summary
Iconoclastic detective Jackson Brodie returns in a triumphant new novel about secrets, sex, and lies.
Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son and an aging Labrador, both at the discretion of his ex-partner Julia. It's picturesque, but there's something darker lurking behind the scenes.
Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, is fairly standard-issue, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network -- and back across the path of his old friend Reggie. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking novel by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today.
"Thank goodness the long Jackson Brodie hiatus is over." --Janet Maslin, New York Times
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Atkinson's slow-moving fifth Jackson Brodie novel (after 2010's Started Early, Took My Dog) finds the former policeman turned PI, who's now based on the east coast of Yorkshire, grappling with parenting. Brodie, who endured a traumatic childhood-a mother lost to cancer, a sister murdered, and a brother who committed suicide-shares custody of 13-year-old Nathan Land, who has an "ego big enough to swallow planets whole," with Nathan's mother, Julia. Though Brodie has some routine work surveilling a suspected cheating spouse, the action only hits high gear relatively late when he happens upon a man about to jump off a cliff, Vince Ives, whose wife, Wendy, was recently fatally bludgeoned with a golf club. Brodie manages to save Vince's life, and his look into Wendy's death involves him in an ugly case of human trafficking. Atkinson has been better at balancing personal and professional story lines, and the presence of a figure from Jackson's past, now a cop involved in an inquiry looking at establishment figures, won't resonate for first-timers. Series fans will best appreciate this outing. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
It's been eight years since Atkinson's last Jackson Brodie mystery (Started Early, Took My Dog, 2011), and, while the three historical novels she has written since then all with some connection to WWII have been uniformly brilliant, fans of the ever-brooding, painfully tenderhearted private investigator will be thrilled that Brodie is finally back. He's living in a remote cottage near the sea in Yorkshire, but somehow he still finds no shortage of troubled souls washing up around him needing help. It begins with a runaway bride and a sad sack with suicide on his mind, and, from there, Jackson's menagerie of broken-winged creatures leads him into something much darker, something that will thoroughly reinforce his ingrained pessimism. (""Have you ever tried being an optimist?"" Jackson's former partner, actress Julia, asks him. ""Once,"" Jackson replies. ""It didn't suit me."") Using her signature narrative style, Atkinson not only tells the story from multiple points of view, but also moves back and forth in time, letting us see new sides of an incident from several characters' perspectives. This technique feeds a rich kind of dramatic irony, as we know marginally more than the people in any one scene do, but never quite enough. As the lives of several Yorkshire couples slowly swirl out of control, with the ripples of dysfunction, buried abuse, and tightly held secrets gradually drawing Jackson into their red tide, we marvel at Atkinson's rare ability to create in a relatively few but stunningly deft brushstrokes at least a half-dozen characters with the depth and complexity to own their own novel. Another dazzler from a writer whose talents know no bounds.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atkinson's blend of literary fiction and crime novel attracts readers in great numbers from both those constituencies.--Bill Ott Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMERICAN MOONSHOT: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, by Douglas Brinkley. (Harper/ HarperCollins, $35.) In his study of the politics behind Apollo ll's launch, Brinkley fits the space program into a wider American social context. He also asks whether the program was worth the tens of billions it cost, and argues that for its technological advances alone, it was. ORIGINAL PRIN, by Randy Boyagoda. (John Metcalf/Biblioasis, paper, $14.95.) This highly original novel traces an unexceptional professor's path to becoming a suicide bomber. The comedy of literary and cultural references involves unfunny matters like cancer, a crisis of faith and Islamic terrorism, as well as easier comic subjects like juice-box fatherhood and academia. BIG SKY, by Kate Atkinson. (Little, Brown, $28.) After a nine-year absence, Atkinson's laconic private eye, Jackson Brodie, returns to deliver his idiosyncratic brand of justice to crime victims in a case involving human trafficking. THE PLAZA: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel, by Julie Satow. (Twelve, $29.) Satow's gossip-stuffed tale traces the history of one of New York's most iconic landmarks, the imposing white chateau at the corner of 59th and Fifth. THE WHITE DEVILS DAUGHTERS: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown, by Julia Flynn Siler. (Knopf, $28.95.) From the Gold Rush to the 1930s, a sex slave trade flourished in San Francisco's Chinatown. Siler's colorful history includes portraits of the determined women who helped thousands of Chinese girls escape to freedom. ORANGE WORLD: And Other Stories, by Karen Russell. (Knopf, $25.95.) Florida is the original or adopted home of some of America's most inventive fiction writers, Russell prominent among them. Her new collection is a feat of literary alchemy, channeling her home state's weirdness into unexpectedly affecting fantastical scenarios and landscapes. STRANGERS AND COUSINS, by Leah Hager Cohen. (Riverhead, $27.) Cheerful and lively, Cohen's new novel - set at an anarchic family gathering in rural New York - packs a lot of themes into its satisfyingly simple frame. As in a Shakespearean comedy, disparate relationships are resolved and familial love prevails. WAR AND PEACE: FDR's Final Odyssey, D-Day to Yalta, 19431945, by Nigel Hamilton. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) The final volume in the "F.D.R. at War" trilogy presents a heroic Roosevelt fending off myopic advisers to lead the Allies to victory. ASSAD OR WE BURN THE COUNTRY: How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria, by Sam Dagher. (Little, Brown, $29.) Dagher draws on history, interviews and his own experience as a reporter in Syria to depict an utterly ruthless regime. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
After the success of Life After Life and A God in Ruins, the novelist shares why she is enjoying writing more as she gets older - and the return of detective Jackson Brodie After nearly 10 years, Kate Atkinson's much-loved detective Jackson Brodie returns in her 12th novel Big Sky . "The best mystery of the decade", Stephen King wrote of Case Histories, Brodie's first appearance back in 2004, but it looked as if he might have been retired for ever after his fourth outing in 2010. "Brodie did have a really long holiday," the author says. During which time, Atkinson won the Costa best novel award twice, for her historical novels Life After Life and A God in Ruins, and wrote last year's Transcription . But she always intended to bring him back, or she would have killed him off, "just to put that to bed". Big Sky started as a screenplay about a female detective, and was originally written for the actor and comedian Victoria Wood, who had appeared in one of the BBC's Brodie adaptations starring Jason Isaacs. Wood did not see the manuscript before her death in 2016 so Atkinson put it aside, before eventually deciding it would work for Brodie, partly because it is set in Yorkshire, where the detective, like his creator, grew up. The idea for the story began with another Yorkshireman, Jimmy Savile, who had a home in Scarborough, with a plaque - now removed - that read "Savile's View" on the railings overlooking the bay. Although the DJ and TV presenter doesn't feature in Big Sky directly, he casts a shadow over a sinister web of storylines that connects child abuse rings in the 1970s and 80s to present-day sex trafficking. Atkinson began writing Big Sky the day after she finished Transcription , her second world war espionage novel. Because the idea had been lurking in her mind for so long, she says, it came really quickly, "and I thought, 'Well I'll just keep on.'" But it must have been a jolt to switch from 1950s spies to contemporary sleazebags overnight. "I need to change tack quite vigorously, quite often," she says. After the initial run of Brodie books, she felt she "never wanted to write another one of these again"; then, following Life After Life , A God in Ruins and Transcription, she decided: "I must stop writing about the war. I go on a groove for so long and then I have to change." The world is a darker place and it is an angrier place... That's what the politics has done to us The Brodie books always deal "with things that are happening now", she stresses. This doesn't mean writing a Brexit novel, she says, although that subject inevitably creeps in (as she points out, it even features in Transcription ). For Brodie - of all Atkinson's characters "the nearest to my kneejerk reaction to things" - Brexit is "the end of civilisation as we know it". As he observes, "the world had grown darker". Even by the standards of the series, Big Sky is bleak. Yet it retains the jauntiness that makes Atkinson so wickedly entertaining. "I know, it's not right somehow," she says, laughing (she laughs a lot). Since Brodie's last appearance "the world is a darker place and it is an angrier place and it is a more bitter place," she says. "That's what the politics has done to us - everyone is now anxious all the time, because we don't know what is going to happen." There are also echoes of the #MeToo moment as, one after another, the female characters dole out justice or revenge on a pile-up of bad men. Although she didn't intend Big Sky to be a "strong women book" it inevitably became one, "because all these middle-aged white blokes have to have their comeuppance - and who is going to give it to them?" As Brodie reflects: "It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn't fall down. They stood up." She had to add names to the list as she was writing, she jokes, and if she were to write it now there would be even more to include. The honourable exception is our man Brodie, "the last good man standing", who always tries "to behave like a gentleman", and although "knocking on a bit now", is ready to dive into the sea or jump off a cliff to rescue someone. "He does have a sheepdog instinct," Atkinson says. "He knows he's got to protect women and children." But he also "has such a strain of darkness in him that he is always going to be responding to the outer darkness". With his tragic childhood, string of divorces and melancholic outlook, he is the archetypal hard-boiled private eye; the only trait he is missing is a weakness for the bottle. "I like to take cliches and try and work with them," she says. But when she first set him to work, she was nervous because she "hadn't really written a male character of any substance before", and she had no intention of writing a crime novel, let alone a detective series to sit alongside Ian Rankin's Rebus or Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse books. But "if you put a detective in a novel it becomes a detective novel, there's no way round it". Where traditional crime fiction is "very narrative driven, like a trail", Atkinson's genius for plotting, combined with an acute sympathy for the inner lives of her characters, has created what she likes to call "a genre of Jackson Brodie" (her publishers plump for "literary crime novel"). Readers who would never pick up a crime novel are "the biggest Jackson Brodie fans now". Above all, the detective is a great device for bringing together multiple storylines and huge casts - Hilary Mantel once wrote that Atkinson must have "a game plan more sophisticated than Dickens". "There are a lot of characters," she concedes. Does her study resemble a procedural room in a TV police drama, covered with sprawling spider diagrams? "It is your working world and you know where everybody is and what everybody needs to do," she says. "I can do it while I'm writing it, afterwards I can't even remember anyone's name." She loves an ending (hence the seemingly endless endings of Life After Life ), somehow managing to tie everything up with forensic neatness. "Everybody gets their just deserts." The question of justice recurs throughout Atkinson's fiction, which always operates according to its own morality (the bodycount in a Brodie novel often rivals that of an episode of Game of Thrones ). In Big Sky "everyone is breaking the law", or taking it into their own hands in one way or another. Brodie fans will welcome the reappearance of Reggie, last seen as a 16-year-old nanny in 2008's When Will There Be Good News? , now a young policewoman. "What else would she become?" Atkinson asks. "Now she's never going to be allowed to be happy. Because she's always going to be seeing bad things. She will be fulfilled." Atkinson has said that "you can't write a novel about happy people having happy lives". "There is so much misery around, I never seem to get round to it." But the author herself always seems remarkably cheery, in a no-nonsense Yorkshire way. "I am, on the whole," she agrees, with that laugh. "If I was really gloomy would I write different books? Maybe this is the place for it - it frees you up, because then you don't have to dwell in it." She was, however, a very fearful, anxious child, something she attributes to being "illegitimate" and not having a sibling (her parents were together, but her mother was unable to get divorced following a disastrous wartime marriage). "There was a lot of suppressed emotion." Born in 1951 and growing up above her parents' shop in York, she was left largely to her own devices. She also wonders if she might have been "tainted" by her father's own miserable childhood - one of poverty, violence and random accident - which she only discovered after his death, and which reads like the backstory of one of her characters. (His grandmother, with whom he lived until he was 10, died falling from a table trying to get a fly paper down - "a wonderful little story: 'Imagine the fly!'") You are not allowed in this country to be confident; women aren't allowed to say 'I think this is really good' Until her early 30s she never thought about becoming a writer: "I was a reader, that was my part in the whole book process." But she won the Women's Own short story competition - "the best moment of my life" - for "the very first thing I wrote that had nothing to do with me". This led to an apprenticeship in magazine stories: "getting everything in there in a very short space ... that was how I learned to write." She published Behind the Scenes at the Museum when she was 43. "Everyone said, you are quite old to have your first novel published, and I'd think, 'Well, now I can get on with it, I've done all the difficult things ... living.'" She had been married twice and has two daughters and now granddaughters. Behind the Scenes won the Whitbread book of the year award in 1995, beating such big literary beasts as Salman Rushdie, which caused a bit of a brouhaha, with headlines such as "Unknown chambermaid wins prize" (she had once worked in a hotel). The whole experience "tainted me for ever", she says now, and she has been wary of interviews ever since. "I always feel as if I want to live as if I have a monastery inside me ... I don't want to be giving away all the time." Although "Yorkshire will be written on my heart for ever", she has spent most of her writing life in Edinburgh, which "cuts you off. I am beyond the wall." She doesn't enjoy parties or networking, "stuff that I always presume is happening in London all the time". Although the day after we meet she is having lunch with her longtime friend Ali Smith - "she's literally the only writer I know", and they never talk about writing, "Never!" They will be celebrating their joint No 1 positions in the hardback and paperback bestseller lists (for Transcription and for Smith's Spring ). Atkinson has never suffered from "blank-page syndrome" and is already at work on two novels simultaneously - "It wakes me up a bit" - one of which is another Brodie. "Yes, he's coming back in a very funny book": an Agatha Christie homage. She's had the beginning and the title for ages - "I've got titles to sell" - and has already written the ending. "I'm in Jackson Brodie mode, so I may as well do it now as opposed to putting it on the shelf of ideas I have." Next on the shelf is her "Big Book", a return to York and to the second world war, called The Line of Sight . As she has got older, she enjoys writing more. But "it has really bad moments. A lot of the time it is completely tedious, but one good sentence can pay off for many, many years of tedium or hell." When the novel is completed, "it's done for ever. It's in the world", and she's "happy just to lie there and watch Netflix all night long, because I need to just empty all that stuff out." She has always felt "a certain confidence" in her writing, "but you are not allowed in this country to be confident; women aren't allowed to say 'I think this is really good'." While readers and critics were dazzled by the formal ingenuity of Life After Life , it is its sequel, A God in Ruins , that she believes to be her best work, "and will remain so", she says emphatically. "That's the book I always wanted to write. People are always telling me how they cried at the end." But she has never made the Booker shortlist (perhaps because she is percieved to be a "genre writer" - "there's no hope for me"), and won't be on any future longlists as she has asked her publishers not to submit her work for prizes any more: "As long as I meet my own standards, that's enough." "To have moved someone to tears and to move to them to laughter is great," she says. "I live to entertain, I don't live to teach or to preach or to be political. If I have a job to do it is to entertain myself first and then everyone else afterwards."
Kirkus Review
Jackson Brodie is back.This is Atkinson's fifth Jackson Brodie novel (Started Early, Took My Dog, 2011, etc.), but fans know that the phrase "Jackson Brodie novel" is somewhat deceptive. Yes, he is the hero in that he is a private investigatorformer cop, military veteranwho solves (usually) mysteries. But he is not so much the central character as the grumpy, anxious, largehearted gravitational field that attracts a motley assortment of lost souls and love interests. In this latest outing, Jackson is a half-duty parent to his teenage son while the boy's mother, an actor, finishes her run on a detective series. Vince Ives is a more-or-less successful middle-class husband and father until his wife leaves him, his boss makes him redundant, and he becomes a murder suspect. Crystal Holroydnot her real namehas built a brilliant new life for herself, but someone from her past is threatening her daughter. Both Vince and Crystal seek help from Jackson, with varying results. Meanwhile, Jackson's protge, Reggie Chase, has risen through the ranks in the police force and is taking a fresh look at an old case. That these stories intertwine is a given. "A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen" is one of Jackson's maxims; it could also serve as an ironic epigram for Atkinson's approach to the mystery genre. A small cast of characters collides and careens in a manner that straddles Greek tragedy and screwball comedy. The humor is sly rather than slapstick, and Atkinson is keenly interested in inner lives and motivations. There are villains, certainlyhuman trafficking and the sexual abuse of children figure prominently herebut even the sympathetic characters are complicated and compromised. Jackson has a strong moral code, but his behavior is often less than ethical. The same is true of Vince, Crystal, and Reggie. The deaths and disappearances that Jackson investigates change with every book, but the human heart remains the central mystery.The welcome return of an existential detective. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.