The Barnes & Noble Review
The truly literary thriller -- or the truly chilling, thrilling literary novel -- often sometimes seems a bit like Bigfoot: many claim to have seen it, and others claim to possess evidence of it, but on closer inspection it's much more likely to be an errant grizzly or a guy in a gorilla suit. But York-born author Kate Atkinson comes about as close to the creature as admirers of artful, incisive prose would want to get with When Will There Be Good News?, an intricately plotted and suspenseful tale of past crimes and present dangers.
Atkinson's first novel, the Whitbread-winning Behind the Scenes of the Museum, was a comic, poignant saga of a middle-class Yorkshire family; her third, Emotionally Weird, was a vibrant but self-consciously tricky exploration of the mother-daughter bond. And then, in an authorial migration undertaken by numerous contemporary literary authors -- including, more recently, the Man Booker winner John Banville -- Atkinson crossed the channel to crime.
While Banville took on the nom de plume Benjamin Black and generally checked his philosophical musings at the door, Atkinson carried her name and preoccupations with her into her detective novels. She is fascinated by fate, loss, family, and how we're shaped by forces (often malevolent) beyond our control. Like many of Graham Greene's self-styled "entertainments," Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels (the others are Case Histories and One Good Turn) offer fine suspense and even finer insights into human psychology.
Like a more conventional mystery, though, When Will There Be Good News? opens with bloodshed, as most of the Mason family -- mother Gabrielle, eight-year-old Jessica, and infant Joseph -- are stabbed to death on a country lane by a psychopathic stranger named Andrew Decker. Six-year-old Joanna is later discovered hiding in a wheat field, unharmed.
Atkinson then jumps 30 years to present-day York, where we meet up with Jackson -- ex-soldier, ex-police inspector, and ex-private investigator, now a rich man thanks to a former client's will but toiling as a security consultant because "a man couldn't lie idle" -- lurking about a village green, watching a child he believes to be his. After smoothly securing a DNA sample in the form of a hair from the boy's head, Jackson departs, only to lose himself in the Yorkshire countryside and wind up on a train not to London, his intended destination, but to Edinburgh.
Which is where Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, Brodie's almost-lover in One Good Turn, is busy telling Joanna, now a successful doctor with a Glaswegian husband and a beloved baby boy, about Andrew Decker's impending release and the probable media frenzy to follow it. Louise, who's recently married but already wondering if matrimonial bliss actually suits her, finds Joanna fascinating. She's "the woman I never became," Louise notes with typical self-criticism, "the good survivor, the good wife, the good mother."
Joanna also functions as surrogate family for 16-year-old orphan Reggie Chase, the baby's nanny. And it's plucky, winning Reggie, a heroine of Dickensian charm, who weaves the threads of this novel together, with no small help from the guiding hand of chance. "Coincidence," Nabokov once wrote, "is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction." It cheats, in other words: it wants something for nothing. But Atkinson, whose detective novels gleefully traffic in small-world acts of fate and fluke, does not write ordinary fiction, and thus the reader is quite content to believe that Louise would learn of Joanna's sudden disappearance when she returns to the Hunter household to question Joanna's husband about a suspicious fire in an arcade he owned. Or that Reggie, eating violet creams and watching Coronation Street at her tutor's house near the railroad tracks, would be one of the first people on the scene at a horrifying train wreck caused by the very same tutor -- or that, amid the carnage, she would come upon, and save the life of, the gravely injured Jackson Brodie.
What makes these chance intersections more piquant than implausible is the reader's sense that despite such connections between characters, loneliness is the true tie that binds them. Each is haunted by the dead, be they family or the innocent victims of crime. Each is alone, even inside a marriage or a borrowed family. "You belong to me," Reggie informs Jackson after he wakes from his coma. While such insistence hardly nets the girl a father figure, it does persuade him to help Reggie in her search for Joanna.
Reggie also enlists Louise's aid, though the detective is skeptical that Joanna needs it; after all, she'd mentioned she might like to get away for a few days. And thus it is that Jackson and Louise -- "two people who had missed each other, sailed right past in the night and into different harbors" -- are reunited on a quest. The novel, which began somewhat leisurely, picks up speed, though it never sacrifices backstory and astute rumination for a whodunit plot. Additional storylines about Reggie's no-good brother and Jackson's beautiful younger wife ("What does this paragon amongst women see in you exactly?" his ex-girlfriend wonders. "Apart from the money, of course") add tension, not to mention a sense that various complications will remain in place long after the mystery of Joanna's whereabouts has been solved.
Atkinson weaves literary references throughout, from playful riffs on Mrs. Dalloway to quick salutes to Descartes, Poe, and Austen, among others. Louise and Jackson share a penchant for quoting -- psalms, lyrics, poems -- while Reggie's thoughts often take an etymological slant ("Carnage from the Latin caro, carnis, meaning 'flesh.' ") Such attention to the bookish feels natural rather than forced, as the characters employ their mnemonic gifts to reassure them in moments of difficulty.
"She is dead; and all which die, to their first elements resolve," thinks Reggie, summoning Donne upon the death of her tutor. But real resolution is hard to come by, even if doctors may be found and criminals get their due. We are all orphans eventually, Atkinson reminds us, and how each of us can come to terms with that fact is one of life's most enduring mysteries.
--Emily Chenoweth
Emily Chenoweth is the former fiction editor of Publishers Weekly. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Bookforum, and People, among other publications. Her first novel will be published by Random House in early 2009.
From Barnes & Noble
Several people's lives converge in this gripping, character-driven novel by Whitbread Book Award winner Kate Atkinson. The story threads back three decades to the lightning-strike moment when six-year-old Joanna Mason witnessed a terrifying crime. Snap forward to a crowded train where an ex-detective passenger is about to hear a life-crushing sound. Meanwhile in Edinburgh, a teenage named Reggie is settling down for her favorite television shows when something shatters her calm. Atkinson manages to knot us into all this terrifying happenstance, propelling us toward an uncertain yet sought-after future.
From the Publisher
On a hot summer day, Joanna Mason's family slowly wanders home along a country lane. A moment later, Joanna's life is changed forever...
On a dark night thirty years later, ex-detective Jackson Brodie finds himself on a train that is both crowded and late. Lost in his thoughts, he suddenly hears a shocking sound...
At the end of a long day, 16-year-old Reggie is looking forward to watching a little TV. Then a terrifying noise shatters her peaceful evening. Luckily, Reggie makes it a point to be prepared for an emergency...
These three lives come together in unexpected and deeply thrilling ways in the latest audiobook from Kate Atkinson, the critically acclaimed author who Harlan Coben calls "an absolute must read."
The Washington Post -
Carolyn See
Thank God, in these hard times, for a cheerful, ghoulish, gory book like this…This is a grand mystery, with plenty of misdeeds and overwrought coincidences, as well as quotes from Scots ballads, old nursery rhymes and the classics, so you can feel edified while being creeped out—as you wait for that happy ending we all long for, and think we deserve.
The New York Times -
Janet Maslin
…[a] deliciously underhanded, echo-filled novel…Although When Will There Be Good News? has been expertly rendered by Ms. Atkinson, it is a reminder that she is too versatile a writer to stick with any one incarnation. It is very much to be hoped that she keeps this gratifying series going. But she has already shown herself capable of creating a varied body of work, starting with her debut novel, the Whitbread prizewinner Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Good as it is, this latest Brodie book nearly bursts at the seams. It shows off an imagination so active that When Will There Be Good News? can barely contain it.
Publishers Weekly
The latest Atkinson mystery finds detective Jackson Brodie back in the English countryside, where he becomes caught up in a missing person's case that forces old memories and past mistakes to the forefront of his mind. Told from a mainly female perspective, both that of detective chief Louise Monroe and victim Joanna Mason, the story is delivered perfectly by narrator Ellen Archer. She is fully and completely aware of the undertones in most of her characters' voices, and when she captures them, she creates a stirring experience for her audience. As Brodie, Archer is slightly less effective, only because she opts for a straightforward, dry tone that is less flashy. But her portrayal of Reggie, a 16-year-old Scottish boy, is amazingly astute and shaded. A Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, July 28). (Sept.)
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Nancy Fontaine
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Library Journal
Evocative, smart, literary, and funny, Atkinson's third novel featuring one-time police detective Jackson Brodie (after Case Histories and One Good Turn) is both complicated and a page-turner. Set mostly around Edinburgh, Scotland, the tale begins with a six-year-old girl escaping an attacker who kills her mother, eight-year-old sister, and baby brother. Atkinson then weaves a plot that connects Brodie to the girl, now an adult, through coincidence and more tragedy, this time a train wreck. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Morse, who has a thing for Brodie, returns to his life, and a new character appears: Reggie, an orphaned 16-year-old girl with a criminal for a brother and a desire to study for her A-levels even though she has dropped out of school. The characters quote literature (sometimes in Latin), and fabulous turns of phrase abound, but the narrative remains buoyant; it is sprinkled liberally with humorous observations (particularly from Reggie), making each wild turn of events seem like just another bump in the road. A book that will easily stand up to more than one reading; highly recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/08.]
Kirkus Reviews
A third appearance for former police investigator and private detective Jackson Brodie in this psychologically astute thriller from Atkinson (One Good Turn, 2006, etc.). In the emotional opening, six-year-old Joanna witnesses the brutal killing of her mother and siblings by a knife-wielding madman in the British countryside. Thirty years later, Joanna, now a doctor in Edinburgh, has become a mother herself. Her baby's nanny is 16-year-old Reggie. To Reggie, whose own mother recently died in a freak accident, Joanna and her baby represent an ideal family (Joanna's husband, a struggling businessman, seems only a vaguely irritating irrelevance to fatherless Reggie). When prickly, self-loathing policewoman Louise Monroe comes to call on lovely, warm-hearted Joanna, watchful Reggie (think Ellen Page from Juno with a Scottish brogue) is struck by the similarities between the two well-dressed professional women. Actually Louise has come to warn Joanna that her family's murderer is being released from prison. Louise chooses not to mention her other reason for visiting, a suspicion that Joanna's husband torched one of his failing businesses for the insurance. Jackson's connection to the others is revealed gradually: Jackson and Louise were once almost lovers although they since married others; as a youth Jackson joined the search party that found Joanna hiding in a field following the murders. Rattled after visiting a child he suspects he fathered despite the mother's denials, Jackson mistakenly takes the train to Edinburgh instead of London. When the train crashes near the house where Reggie happens to be watching TV, she gives him CPR. Soon afterward, Joanna's husband tells Reggie that Joannahas gone away unexpectedly. Suspecting foul play, Reggie involves Louise and Jackson in individual searches for the missing woman and baby. While Louise and Jackson face truths about themselves and their relationships, Joanna's survival instincts are once more put to the ultimate test. Like the most riveting BBC mystery, in which understated, deadpan intelligence illuminates characters' inner lives within a convoluted plot.
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