I bought this book when it came out. It came highly
recommended and with a lot of splashy reviews. I had a hard time getting into
the story, especially with the way the story started. It was very
disconcerting.
I picked it up and put it down a number of times in the
interim. This year I decided that I must persevere at least up until the half
way mark; I am happy that I persevered, for this is a remarkable book, even
though it is gloomy and dark.
A professor once said that a good mystery starts with the
murder weapon introduced on the first page, and the murder is solved on the
last with the weapon prominently featured. While not following the edict exactly,
Kate Atkinson does marvelous work entering tidbits of facts, clues and
descriptions that makes very little sense initially but as the story gets
rolling along, the tidbits begin to fit together in a coherent manner. She has
a masterful way of describing and observing the people’s surroundings with
their inner voice, their personality. Her eye for detail and words make those
scenes, even when it is a head fake, extremely interesting to read.
The characters are well thought out and well developed; you
see them as others see them as well as how they see themselves. Not all of them
are sympathetic obviously, but the reader does hang their words as the story
develops. They are all flawed in their own way, they have all been damaged in
their own way, which is what makes for the tapestry of the plot so intriguing
and enthralling. Atkinson is the weaver of multiple complex threads to create
this tapestry. Even when she telegraphs the plot twist, I didn’t mind much as I
was engrossed in the telling.
Without giving away the plot, the story involves the
survivor of a long ago senseless crime, a young orphan girl, and a couple of
police detectives, one former and one present, their entanglements, past and
present. The resolution of the full story was complete without seeming fanciful,
except for a couple of the storylines felt rushed at the end, as resolutions
are wont to be.
A bonus for me is that part of the story takes place in
Scotland, one of my favored locales. While the comparison to the Tartan Noir
School could be loosely drawn, I would place this novel on its own because it
is so uniquely told.
I am now a Kate Atkinson fan. More books to buy.
