So, just so you know the kind of guy I am. I’m the guy who literally gasps out loud in the bookstore. The day I spotted this book cover, I did. See, I discovered Kate Atkinson a few years ago and I deliriously read through every novel she’d written at that point in a single go, which included the four books in the Jackson Brodie series. I gave them all four stars. Not just the Jackson Brodie books, all of the novels. The Brodie novels are, superficially, mystery novels and they’re darn good ones, filled with twists and turns. But they’re also deconstructions of the mystery genre and they use the conventions and deconstructions as ways to get at some really fascinating ideas. They’re full on great literature and great genre literature at the same time. So I was super-pumped to catch up to retired policeman Jackson Brodie, nine years older and quite a bit crankier (and he was already pretty cranky) than when we saw him last in Started Early, Took My Dog, which is one of the best book titles ever of course. Atkinson is going over a lot of the same ground she went over in the previous four books. Jackson Brodie is a character shaped by a family tragedy, particularly by a violent act against his sister. And so Brodie is as a character what the series is as well: haunted by violence against women. In this book, we leap into the ugly world of human trafficking and sexual abuse and things get dark, really dark. But Atkinson still has her sharp eye for character and, as usual, Jackson is less the main character and more just another member of a whirling ensemble where every single person feels absolutely real. Also, as what seems like a special favor to me, Atkinson has brought back my favorite supporting character of the series, young Reggie Chase, all grown up and a cop herself now; I was so thrilled by that. Atkinson is still good at weaving laugh out loud moments into tragic stories and Big Sky ran the emotional gamut for me. Atkinson’s stories are always deeply sad and filled with tragedy and misfortune, but there’s also a kind of battered hope, well, even more than hope, a kind of actual optimism that seems to be saying, not that everything is going to be OK or even that we’re going to make it, but that we can still do good things. That no matter how deeply broken the world is, we all, every day, have opportunities to do good things. Sometimes they’re small; sometimes they, if not change the whole world, change individual lives for the better. We can’t fix everything; but what we can fix, we should. When we have a choice, do the right thing. There’s something deeply humanist about Atkinson’s work, deeply empathetic. Clearly she’s just writing right on my wavelength, but hopefully it’s yours too. Is Big Sky a good starting place? I mean, it’s fine; it’s not necessary that you’ve read the first four books in the series to really enjoy this one. But why would you rob yourself of those pleasures? Book one is called Case Histories. Big Sky will be waiting when you get to it. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Kate Atkinson brilliantly returns to her post-modern mystery series with another outstanding exploration of trauma, tragedy and hope; as twisty and thrilling as ever too. 4 stars.