Case Histories: A Novel by Kate Atkinson and Susan Jameson

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Case Histories: A Novel
Available from Amazon
Price: $16.49
Updated on 12-28-2008.

Features

Audio CD

Publisher: Hachette Audio; Unabridged edition (September 1, 2008)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1600245005

ISBN-13: 978-1600245008

Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 5.4 x 1.5 inches

Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces ()

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Private detective Jackson Brodie finds himself entangled in three distinctly different cases only to thread the needle time and again and come across remarkable connections between them. Susan Jameson delivers an absolutely stunning performance; her classically trained voice is perfect for Atkinsons prose and the shifting point-of-view narration. Though the lead protagonist is male, listeners will never question Jamesons abilities; she brings raw emotion to this tale and her British dialect also gives the story a vintage mystery feel. As Brodie, Jameson is simply flawless, delivering her words firmly and with resoluteness. Hers is a performance that demands repeated listens. A Back Bay paperback (Reviews, Oct. 25, 2004). (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
The population of Cambridge, England, is well over 100,000, but you wouldn't think it was any larger than a sewing circle from reading Case Histories, the most recent offering from British novelist Kate Atkinson. The characters in this pensive detective thriller can't help but impinge upon one another's lives, even though they may not be aware of one another's names. The coincidences that bind them together would be ridiculously unbelievable in almost any other kind of novel; in a mystery, they're forgivable. And in a mystery where the dead bodies turn out to be far less important to the story than the survivors who mourn them, the coincidences seem almost mystical: markers of a grand, melancholy design built from the sorrows of anyone who has ever lost a loved one and never gotten over it. Jackson Brodie -- private detective, Francophile, divorcé, overprotective father -- tools around Cambridge tailing wives who are suspected of adultery, work that only drives home the pain of his own recently dissolved marriage. When three new cases fall into his lap -- all officially "cold," as far as the police are concerned, and all brought to Jackson by relatives of the murdered or missing -- he's grateful for the work, as well as for the opportunity to immerse himself in something other than the bad memories he can't seem to shake. The first case, brought by a pair of perpetually squabbling sisters, involves the decades-old disappearance of their baby sister, abducted from their backyard one night and never found. Amelia and Julia Land hire Jackson after discovering in their deceased (and despised) father's belongings a favorite stuffed toy that had belonged to little Olivia, a toy she was undoubtedly carrying when she went missing. Why would he have kept it a secret so long? And why did he have it in the first place? Jackson is charged with determining once and for all what the police couldn't, and what the sisters suspect: that their father took to his grave a dark and horrible secret. The second case is brought by Theo Wyre, a retired lawyer who has made the unsolved, 10-year-old murder of his daughter the sole obsession of his sad and solitary life. Theo asks Jackson to find the man who walked into Theo's law office and stabbed his daughter to death after asking for Theo by name, then casually walked outside and into thin air. In Theo -- overweight, lonely, unable to get on with his life -- Jackson detects some spectral future version of himself, and his willingness to take on the difficult case bespeaks his fear of turning out the same way. Just as Jackson is unearthing the first clues that will eventually unlock both secrets, into his office walks a third client: the sister of a notorious axe murderer who took her husband's life in front of their infant daughter and then took herself "off the grid" after serving her time in prison. Jackson assumes he is being asked to find the murderess and is surprised to learn that he's not: The client wants to learn the whereabouts of the now-grown infant, her niece, who has similarly vanished off the face of the Earth. Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won England's Whitbread Award in 1995 for its lovingly told account of a dysfunctional middle-class English family; thanks to the strength of its characters, it's still a popular choice for book clubs in America as well as in the United Kingdom. In taking on detective fiction -- a genre whose circumscribed rules don't typically allow for too much character development -- Atkinson, whose inclinations are more literary, is taking a risk. No one ever wanted to know what Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade were "feeling." What's supposed to matter is plot, plot, plot. Judged by that standard alone, Case Histories is a noble failure. The aforementioned coincidences that tie these characters together strain, and then exhaust, credulity; and anyone who can't connect the dots on their own and figure everything out by the book's last third needs to go back to Hammett 101 for a refresher course. But if you read the novel instead as a multifaceted character study grafted onto the detective-thriller format, it's a rousing triumph, thanks in whole to Atkinson's boundless sympathy for her funny, pathetic, three-dimensional and fully human creations. Jackson Brodie wants to be Marlowe or Spade, but his tough-guy aspirations are continually subverted by his doting-father instincts. (He's forever fretting over his young daughter's choices in music and clothing, terrified that popular culture is priming her for lasciviousness.) The Land sisters, Julia and Amelia, are, respectively, a sexually free-spirited bohemian and her exact opposite, a Victorian prude whose overdue awakening comes as both a surprise and a relief. And Theo Wyre brings new poignancy to the word "heartbroken." When his poor, overworked, undernourished heart gives out on him after a stressful walk, he draws momentary comfort from the sight of a good Samaritan whom he takes to be his dead daughter, "come to take him home." Breaking detective-thriller form, Case Histories is told from multiple points of view, reducing the burden on Jackson to "solve" the crimes for us and letting each character bloom in the light of the author's sharp, observant prose. That's something that the genre's hard-boiled forefathers would never have done; for them, the ratiocinative novel was a one-man job, and sympathetic characters just gummed up the works. Kate Atkinson, though, seems to have intuited that the most compelling mystery of all isn't necessarily whodunit, but rather howtodealwithit. Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Case Histories: A Novel (Hardcover) Jackson Brodie, a private detective, is investigating three old cases, which soon begin to converge and overlap. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared without a trace thirty-five years ago while sleeping outside with one of her sisters, two of whom have hired Jackson to find out what happened. Theo Wyre has hired him to investigate the death of his daughter Laura Wyre, who was killed by a maniac ten years before while working in her father's office. Shirley Morrison, Jackson's third client, is trying to locate her sister and her niece. Her sister Michelle, living with her husband and young daughter on an isolated farm, has vanished from Shirley's life, and after twenty-five years, Shirley wants to find her. Atkinson's suspenseful and dramatic cases pique the reader's interest in the characters and their lives, especially the female characters. Most have faced traumatic events and suffered through less than ideal childhoods, which unfold inexorably as the cases become more complex. Not a linear narrative, the novel focuses on different characters in successive chapters, moving back and forth in time to provide background and to set up the overlaps which eventually occur. The characters are sometimes bizarre, baffling, and even unsympathetic, but they are always memorable for their behavior and their justifications for it. Filled with ironies and noir humor, the novel also reveals Atkinson's astute observation of social interactions, as she skewers some aspects of her characters' lives while also creating sympathy for them. While the first two case histories-that of the missing Olivia and the murdered Laura-are genuinely sad and regarded overall as tragedies, the story of Michelle Fletcher, and peripherally, her sister Shirley, is much darker. Neither Michelle nor Shirley elicits much empathy after the opening chapter, but the occasional interjection of their story line stirs up the action, changes the pace, and keeps the novel from being overly melodramatic. Atkinson's eventual revelations about Michelle's life provide Atkinson with some of her best opportunities for social satire and wit. Readers will delight in Atkinson's characterizations, and the ironies are priceless, with the biggest noir twists saved for last. Though the cases are, in fact, all "solved" by Jackson, they are not really resolved. At least five important "loose ends" regarding the perpetrators of these murders and disappearances remain, showing that even murder cases are not as "cut and dried" as one might expect. (4.5 stars) Mary Whipple

Case Histories: A Novel
List Price: $24.98
Available from Amazon
Price: $16.49
Updated on 12-28-2008.