Case Histories: A Novel - Dark Publications

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Product Description
Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night.

Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac's apparently random attack.

Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making - with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband - until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.

Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigator Jackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge . . .

Customer Reviews: Read 140 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Delightful novel, filled with irony and mordant wit. December 12, 2004
84 out of 87 found this review helpful

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

4 out of 5 stars

Thoroughly enjoyable. October 29, 2004
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

This is my first venture at Atkinson, and I have to say she's a delightful writer to read. She really knows how to hook you.

The story opens with the accounts of three crimes from the perspectives of those who were there at the time. Then, in the present, we meet private investigator Jackson Brodie (a former police inspector) who is dealing with his painful divorce, serious dental problems, and his ever-maturing eight-year-old daughter. Jackson's perspective guides the rest of the narrative through new leads in the three cases, and it isn't long before all three cases are entwined via their connection with Jackson.

While this sounds like a stock mystery novel or something straight off a British crime drama, Atkinson's style offers a little more than the standard mystery fare. She leaps one perspective to another with admirable grace, always managing to keep the many characters and their intertwining narratives totally distinct and completely engrossing.

My only qualms with the story had to do with the plot itself: it's pretty easy to pick up the clues Atkinson drops, and thus, figure out the conclusion well before the ending; and as for the ending--it wasn't as satisfying as it could have been. But her writing is so fluid, by turns funny and poingant, that I couldn't put it down.

4 out of 5 stars

Lucinda, Emmylou and Trisha, Three Of A Kind October 29, 2005
19 out of 30 found this review helpful

Three families, lives torn apart, loved ones found dead and all young women on the verge of womanhood. Kate Atkinson has written a marvelous tale of three separate mysteries that come together at the end.

Jackson Brodie, finder of the lost, the lonely, and those not wanting to be found. He is a man with many mysteries himself. A likeable man, but not one that can keep his marriage together. He is brought into three mysteries by members of families who want to find the answers to why and what has happened to their loved one. Olivia, sister of Amelia and Julia, the three (a)'s. She went missing one night and no one has found her in the twenty odd years gone by. Jackson is asked by her sisters to find her after their father, Victor dies and they find an odd memento in his things. Tanya, the baby who witnessed her mother swing an ax and give her father a couple of whacks. Where she and Michelle, Tanya's aunt is is looking for her. And, then, Laura, killed by a man in a yellow golfing sweater. Her father Theo has been looking for this man since the murder. Jackson Brodie is the man to work these mysteries, as long as he can keep himself alive.

Jackson loves the three women, Trisha, Emmylou and Lucinda. I like them,. also. Their songs bring the music of the down and out , the sexually aware, and the theme of living on the edge. Kate Atkinson injects more than a little sex into these mysteries. She tells us of the first love and the sex of the first "time". There is the older woman who is looked at as a spinster, with no sex life. And, then there is Jackson himself, who seems to attract his clients sexually as well as professionally. He is quite a man and the little misfortunes of his life, the brake leak in his car, the explosion of his house, and the beating of his body. Only bring the humanity of the man to the fore. He is good at his job and he does solve some of the mysteries set before him. However, there will be more of Jackson Brodie, and he will solve more mysteries as his career looms along. We like Jackson and so does Kate Atkinson. A fun and mysterious read. Recommended. prisrob

2 out of 5 stars

A gossipy, pointless yarn May 5, 2005
14 out of 21 found this review helpful

There is a lot less to Case Histories than meets the eye. It starts out with a brief factual account of three apparently unrelated cases: two gruesome murders and one case of a child gone missing and presumed dead. It'll be quite a feat of juggling, you think, to keep these three balls in the air. Unfortunately, Atkinson drops two of them and bobbles the third. Without revealing the ending, suffice it to say that on finishing Case Histories, the reader feels cheated by a resolution based on cheap authorial tricks (similar to an ending where the central character wins the lottery). So a word of warning: don't work too hard attempting to solve these cases as you read, because in two of them there are no "clues" in the text, and in the third psychobabble substitutes for motivation.

Case Histories is peopled by cardboard characters who live in a soulless world of dysfunctional families and marriages, loveless sexual relationships, and rampant child abuse and abduction. We know the characters primarily through what cars they drive, what CDs they listen to, what outfits they wear, and how much money they have. We do get glimpses into the minds of the two most fully realized characters, Julia and Amelia, but the results are less than memorable. The male characters are hopelessly bad. The central character, Jackson Brody, the detective, is so bland as to be almost a cipher. He is supposed to be a likeable guy, attractive to women, but he's married to a woman who hates him so much (for reasons that remain unclear) that she's moving to New Zealand for the express purpose of hurting him by taking his daughter away from him. Another, Theo, is little more than a walking eating disorder who is plagued by a monomaniacal obsession with his daughter, who was one of the murder victims; his main activity in the novel, other than being extremely obese, is a pitiful kind of worship at her shrine, much like some latter-day male Amelia Sedley. A third, Victor (the Victorian paterfamilias - get it?) needs only a tail, horns, and a pitchfork to complete the picture.

I do give Case Histories an extra star because of the writing style, which is lively in a gossipy, racy sort of way. I don't particularly enjoy this kind of writing, but some readers might, and taken for what it is, it has some merit. Another point in the novel's favor is that it contains the ultimate "what happens to the father who wakes the baby" punchline.

3 out of 5 stars

Good but not Great July 24, 2006
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

This is the first book I've read of Atkinson's, and while it's fairly entertaining, I'm not quite sure what all the hype is about. The story revolves around 30something ex-cop Jackson Brodie, who plies his private investigative skills in present-day Cambridge, England. He is called upon to look into three cases from the past, which are introduced in the three opening chapters. The first involves the disappearance of a small girl in 1970, the second involves the apparently random murder of teenage girl in 1994, and the third involves the whereabouts of a woman who killed her husband in 1979. As Jackson looks into these different blasts from the past, we also see him struggling with his personal life. Like so many fictional police and detective protagonists he's divorced and estranged from his ex-wife, and barely able to connect with his 8-year-old daughter. He also has a family secret in his past which is alluded to several times before being revealed at the end.

The cases are all quite dark, and Atkinson does a very good job of conveying the sense of sorrow and loss that surrounds each. Jackson pursues them without a lot of hope but with due diligence and as in so many procedurals, discovers threads to each that went unexplored. It's diverting enough, but many of the characters are somewhat superficial, which keeps the book from being as good as it might have been. In the first case, the father is the archetype distracted, brusque professor, each of the four sisters is a "type" (the golden child, the outgoing dramatic one, the repressed lost middle one, the weird religious one), and there's a crone who lives next door with a gazillion cats. In the third story, the murderess is a typical teenage mother with postpartum depression, and the victim is a typical dashing young man who settles down into a somewhat less dashing adulthood. Theo, the father of the victim in the second story is better developed, and a genuinely sympathetic character who still mourns the loss of his daughter. Perhaps most egregiously, we never really get to know Jackson all that well.

The chapters hopscotch between the different storylines, and the plot unravels in the manner of a good airplane or beach read. The writing is all very fluid and professional, although there's no sense of style to mark it. There's some nice bits of humor, some nice bits of human insight, a decent irony here and there. However, there are other elements that are rather clumsily handled, such as the true reason which is unveiled for the missing little girl from the first case, as well as the adult development of one of the two sisters, which is ridiculously forced. Similarly, the dark secret about Jackson's past is totally over-the-top and unnecessary, serving no real purpose in relation to his character. There's also a homeless girl who appears throughout the book whose identity should be pretty obvious very early on, and although Atkinson leaves it unspoken, it's kind of a groaner. To her credit, it's nice that she doesn't quite spell everything out and tie up every loose end in a neat bow. On the whole, it's fairly enjoyable, and I would read another set of Jackson Brodie investigations, but there's nothing particularly groundbreaking here. For a more interesting recent take on the modern British detective story, try Patrick Neate's "City of Tiny Lights."

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