January 19, 2006
Case Histories
I finished listening to Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, read by Susan Jameson, in the car yesterday. I had seen the book on a number of year-end best books lists, and was surpried I hadn't seen it earlier given that I had read two of her other books, Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Emotionally Weird (and while I can't actually remember a thing about either of them, I think I remembered liking them.) This one is a detective story -- private detective Jackson Brodie looks into three old cases, one involving two sisters who discover a shocking clue to the disappearance of their third sister thirty years earlier, one where a lawyer is searching for his daughter's murderer, and one where a woman whose past mistakes and demanding family life culminate in a violent escape. Meanwhile someone is trying to kill Brodie and his ex-wife is threatening to move away with their daughter. The lives and stories of the characters weave into one another and the characters are all richly decribed and the narration is perfect. I would definitely recommend it -- I didn't know anything about it going into it and was a bit shocked at the end of the first chapters, but the investigation is great.