Felt slightly nervous reading about lots of missing girls as I have a baby daughter but the horror is balanced out in the end. There is a lot of humour and humanity as well as crime/detective elements. ( )

Excellent, complicated mystery--three or four different threads weave and cross and interweave to build something complex and unforgettable.

Great detective. Great read. ( )

Four cases that intertwine and resolve in connected ways. Love for daughters is strong. Missing women is a passion for Brodie, who is very ethical. Cambridge, York. Humor. Great! ( )

Jackson Brodie is living in Cambridge – his wife has left him and he is living a fairly humdrum existence as a private investigator. The cases include: Olivia, who disappeared in 1970, and whose eccentric sisters, Amelia and Julia want to find out what happened to her; Binky, an eccentric (rich) old lady who wants Brodie to find one of her many cats; Theo, the obese father of Laura, who was violently murdered in his office ten years earlier, wants to identify the killer; Michelle, who apparently murdered her husband with an axe while suffering ante natal depression; Nicola, who is suspected by her husband of having an affair. Kate Atkinson weaves all of these cases in her skilful way into a fascinating study of the various characters and their backgrounds. It all comes together in surprising ways – altogether a very satisfying read. ( )

A crime novel with all the ingredients of a great crime novel made unique by the fact that it seems to disregard the crime elements as soon as they are introduced. A wonderful book that looks at the effects and consequences of crime in the lives of normal, everyday and - something Kate Atkinson does with such ease - real people.

The book opens with three short chapters introducing us to 3 families each ending with a crime; abduction, murder and mystery. Fast forward through time and we are introduced to Jackson Brodie (a real copper's name!), a cynical, tough, ex-policeman with an estranged wife and child eeking out a living as a private investigator and, when we first meet him, chain smoking and disillusioned. I told you Kate had condensed all the familiar elements of the crime genre. I get the impression this is Kate Atkinson's nod to the crime genre, an inside joke with herself at the reader's expense, as the book goes on Jackson becomes less 'generic' and more real. All of her characters become real people, the book divides between the past and the present and between members from the three families at the start, all connected through Jackson. One of the more memorable lines from the book is Jackson's view of his job, he looks at it as if there are two columns, lost and found, and everyone in the book has lost something or someone. Theo Wyre has lost a daughter and wants to know why, he asks Jackson to find her murderer. Julia and Amelia two sisters have recently lost their father, they find a toy their abducted younger sister used to play with and ask Jackson to try and find out what happened to her. The mysterious blonde hiding a secret (again a cliche of the hardboiled detectives and their femme fatales) asks Jackson to find a long lost relative. Jackson himself we discover has also lost in his past.

But where Kate Atkinson really excels is in not letting all of this darken the mood of the story, it does not become overly gritty nor depressingly 'real' as other crime novels may have tempted to. Her characters are so delightfully written full of human quirks that, although the reader sympathises with them, winces as they suffer, we never give in and neither do they, there is an optimism throughout the book that somehow by the end everything will turn out all right after all. This is not to say that this is not an emotional book, children have been killed and sisters have gone missing and Kate Atkinson writes truthfully about the pain for the parents and family left behind but by the end they and the reader have “closure” as they say in the book. At the end Atkinson even manages to pull out the ‘twist in the tale’ from her bag of ‘crime ingredients’ and it manages to try and balance out some of the evil at the start in the three opening Case Histories. ( )