when will there be good news by kate atkinson

A soldier turned policeman turned detective turned man of leisure, he is hangdog and lovelorn but nevertheless stalwart, and his talent for blundering into trouble is matched only by his handiness in getting out of it again.īecause his vexations are inevitably both personal and professional, Brodie couldn't find himself in Edinburgh (even by accident) without somehow getting embroiled in matters of keen interest to Louise Monroe. Brodie somehow becomes hopelessly tangled up in all of these catastrophes. The perpetrator of the old crime has just been released from prison, the only surviving victim goes missing, and the night train from London derails on the outskirts of a scruffy working-class suburb.

'When Will There Be Good News?' begins with an eruption of bloody and unfathomable brutality in the Devonshire countryside, then jumps forward 30 years, to contemporary Edinburgh. You don't need to have read the earlier two books to appreciate this one, but I can't think of any reason to deny yourself the delights of all three. The latest is 'When Will There Be Good News?' and it is, like its two predecessors, a work of fancy, genre-bending footwork in which a rueful, cranky, modern comedy-of-manners dances an intricate minuet with an unlikely partner: a kidnapping plot. English novelist Kate Atkinson has been fruitfully exploring the chasm between the two for several years now, inventing new ways to write about murder and its aftermath in three books featuring the same protagonist, Jackson Brodie. In real life, violent crime is a horror in popular fiction it's the occasion for light entertainment.

When will there be good news by kate atkinson