“What are you, Jackson, the last good man standing?”

Bingo Square: And So It Begins

Case Histories is the first in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. He’s a former police inspector turned private eye (with a stint in the army to boot) and there are three main cases he’s involved in within this book. Case 1: The disappearance, over thirty years before, of a three year old girl from her back garden. Case 2: The seemingly random killing of a solicitor’s daughter. Case 3: The murder of a husband by his wife with an axe. Jackson also has to deal with his ex wife and her new husband, a scatty cat lady constantly calling on him for help, and the fact that someone seems to be out to get him…

I really enjoyed this one. I feel like I want to devour all of Atkinson’s books right now, her writing is so accomplished. It is funny and moving and also gripping. I stayed up reading this last night even though I have a cold and should have gone to bed early (something the universe paid me back for by having one of my toddlers wake up every hour to scream – she has a cold too, nobody is happy about it). But I wanted to get to the end and see how the cases resolved and also see the characters get what they deserved – whether that be closure or prison time. There are parts of this book that made me ache and want to cry – the loss of a little girl, the loss of a teenage daughter. It’s the kind of thing you can’t comprehend and don’t know how you would withstand. Alas, not everyone gets their just desserts, several of the cases are left a little open-ended. Maybe they crop up again in later Jackson Brodie books? I don’t know, and I don’t mind too much. Life isn’t neat, so why should literature be?