Review by New York Times Review
Kate Atkinson returns to a crime series, with layered mysteries and studies in human nature. IT'S West Yorkshire not long before the Yorkshire Ripper starts his killing spree, and two police officers make a grisly discovery. Behind a locked door in a block of flats lies the decomposing body of a woman. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is there's a child locked in with her, "filthy, nothing but skin and bone," looking "like a famine victim." Slain women have become a staple of Kate Atkinson's crime novels, which also feature the gruff yet protective ex-cop, ex-P.I., ex-husband and father of two, Jackson Brodie. "Started Early, Took My Dog" is the fourth book in a series noted for its unorthodoxy. The Brodie novels are twisting, turning, tangled narratives that leap from decade to decade, character to character, with the secrets playing second fiddle to Atkinson's sad and funny studies in human nature. Age 45 when we first met him in 2004 in "Case Histories," Jackson is now 50, and, in four books covering five years, he has been through several lifetimes' worth of ordeals (winning and losing a fortune, marrying a grifter, barely surviving a train crash, to mention just a few). Jackson is "off the grid" now, semiretired, picking up jobs that mostly involve looking for people, though "not necessarily finding them." His current assignment is to trace the biological parents of a woman named Hope McMaster, adopted back in the 1970s when she was 2 by a British couple who promptly moved their little family to New Zealand. (He's also hoping to find his second ex-wife, the one who "had taken him for the longest of cons - seduced, courted, married and robbed him blind.") Hard-won clues soon lead Jackson to the door of Tracy Waterhouse, one of those two unlucky West Yorkshire officers whose 1975 flashback opened the book. But she isn't at home, and Jackson isn't the only person looking for her. Precisely where she is and what she's doing is another of the book's many mysteries. Not long retired from the force, she now works on a security detail at a local shopping complex. Doing her rounds one day, she encounters a woman she knows from her police days (a "prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey"), who has in her clutches a screaming child. Tracy follows the pair to a bus stop where, inexplicably - "Tracy didn't know how it happened" - she offers to buy the child for £3,000. The woman accepts. Jackson can't find Tracy because she's trying not to be found. She's hiding out with her new acquisition, a little girl named Courtney, making plans to change their identities and take flight as "Imogen Brown and her little girl, Lucy." She imagines "walking hand in hand with the kid into a clean, untarnished, white future. She would make up for all the other lost kids. One fallen fledgling popped back into the nest." Good-hearted Tracy: over 50, overweight and in over her head. She tells herself she's rescuing Courtney, and perhaps she is. But Courtney's true identity is hazy, and as some 35-year-old questions begin to be answered troubling parallels emerge. Decades from now, will the anguish of Hope McMaster, the woman Jackson is tracing - the woman with "the black hole at the beginning of her life" - repeat itself for Courtney? Is Tracy trying to save a mistreated little girl or herself? Atkinson's characters tend to have bleak pasts, which she mines most expertly, if sometimes to the point of distraction. Jackson, as we learned in "Case Histories," has never recovered from his sister's unsolved murder. It chases him through all these novels, fostering his intensity and his protective concern for women. (Like the matter of Courtney's questionable identity, Jackson's personal cold case seems to warrant its own book.) Tracy's childhood wasn't so much traumatic as bare and unloving, precisely not what she has planned for Courtney. As for Tilly . . . Wait, Tilly? Who's Tilly? Tilly is an elderly actress playing a role that's largely peripheral to the book's central mysteries, but which taps into its themes of loss and regret. Like so many of the women in these pages, Tilly is mourning a lost chance at motherhood, in her case because of a miscarriage "back in the Soho days." (There's a passing reference to a woman who has "no kids, by choice," but she's "hard-nosed" and likes her "lifestyle" too much.) Past sorrows are coming back to life for Tilly, even as the present is disappearing, falling through the cracks in her mind. Atkinson conveys Tilly's dementia through an intense stream-of-consciousness narrative in which thoughts slide hither and thither, from Tweets to Tweety-pie, billabong to billy, coddled eggs to coddling a child. ("'Coddle' was a lovely word, like cuddle. If Tilly had a little girl to look after she would coddle her.") It's during one of those many bewildered moments (she's in a mall, disoriented and suspected of shoplifting) that Tilly chances upon Jackson, who lends her a comforting hand. "So nice," she thinks, "to encounter a proper gentleman these days." Women of every age are drawn to Jackson. And he certainly does have an air of the strong, silent, poetry-loving (Emily Dickinson!) British detective about him. He's far too irreverent to wear Adam Dalgliesh's shoes, of course, but that only adds to Jackson's appeal. Consider, for a moment, how he puts his newly discovered violent side to use: by slugging a mean, tattooed, barrel-chested thug in order to rescue a small dog, that's how. Rescuing dogs, children and little old ladies? Isn't Atkinson starting to lay it on a bit thick? Sure. But it's terribly charming. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New Zealand.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 24, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This is the fourth entry in Atkinson's brilliant series featuring semi-retired detective Jackson Brodie. Feeling his age, Jackson is touring the ruined abbeys of northern England, a sucker for great landscapes and the poetry of Emily Dickinson (from which the novel's title is taken). He's also trying to track down the biological parents of a woman who was adopted as a child. How that case intersects with a series of crimes committed in Leeds in the 1970s is just one of the many strands Atkinson seamlessly weaves together in a plot driven by coincidence and a diamond-hard recognition of man's darker nature. Meanwhile, lonely retired police detective Tracy Waterhouse, whose years on the force have left her with a shell so thick there was hardly any room left inside, witnesses a prostitute abusing a child and, in a moment of madness, offers her cash for the kid. Her odyssey as a new parent to a waif dressed in a ragged fairy costume, relayed with both tenderness and wry wit, must be one of the grandest love affairs in crime fiction, and it leads her, as all roads in Atkinson's world do, straight to Jackson's door. For its singular melding of radiant humor and dark deeds, this is must-reading for literary crime-fiction fans. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atkinson's new novel sees the return of soulful detective Jackson Brodie; the previous three entries in the series have, together, sold more than 525,000 copies.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When Tracy Waterhouse, a recently retired police detective, sees a repeat criminal offender, Kelly Cross, aggressively dragging a small child through town, she impulsively decides to buy Kelly's child. Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, a private investigator, also finds himself forcibly taking custody of a vulnerable being-this time it's an abused dog. Both Waterhouse and Brodie find themselves pulled together into a complicated mix of mysteries as they discover more about their new companions. Graeme Malcolm enriches the narrative with his deep, raspy, English-accented voice. When delivering the story from female points of view, Malcolm lightens his growl and shifts tone well enough to be convincing. The one drawback is that sometimes his delivery around quick exchanges between characters or even within the narrative text can be hard to follow. A Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur hardcover. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Jackson Brodie returns in Atkinson's fourth novel (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News?) featuring the former policeman. Jackson (semiretired at 50) is doing some private detective work and trying to come to grips with his personal life, which includes a teenage daughter from his first marriage, a son with a former lover, and a second wife who stole his savings. Jackson adds a small dog to the mix by rescuing it from its abusive owner as he undertakes an "innocent" request from a woman in Australia: Could Jackson help her find her birth parents in England? In this literary mystery on the theme of missing children, nothing is innocent or simple. The intricate narrative, composed with deftness and humor, moves among scenes set alternately in 1975 and the present and contains a cast of well-drawn characters whose relationships unfold like the layers of a peeled onion. VERDICT This book will not disappoint Atkinson and Jackson Brodie fans, but it might be a stretch for some readers to keep up with the multifaceted plot, though it is well worth the effort. [Five-city author tour; see Prepub Alert, 12/13/10.]-Nancy Fontaine, Dartmouth Coll., Hanover, NH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
British private detective Jackson Brodie, star of three previous Atkinson novels (When Will There Be Good News, 2008, etc.), finds himself embroiled in a case which shows that defining crime is sometimes as difficult as solving it.Tracy Waterhouse, who is middle-aged, overweight and lonely, heads security for a mall in Leeds. Retired from the local police force, she remains haunted by one of her earliest cases, when she and her partner found a little boy abandoned in the apartment where his mother had been murdered days earlier. Although the murderer was supposedly found (but died before being brought to trial), Tracy never learned what happened to the child with whom she'd formed a quick bond. When Tracy sees a known prostitute/lowlife mistreating her child at the mall, she impulsively offers to buy the child, and the woman takes the money and runs. Tracy knows she has technically broken the law and even suspects the woman might not be the real mother, but her protective instinct and growing love for the little girl named Courtney overrides common sense; she begins arrangements to flee Leeds and start a new life with the child. Meanwhile, Jackson has come to Leeds on his own case. Raised and living in Australia, adoptee Hope McMaster wants information about her birth parents, who supposedly died in a car crash in Leeds 30 years ago. As he pursues the case, Jackson considers his relationships with his own kidsa troublesome teenage daughter from his first marriage and a young son whom DNA tests have recently proved he fathered with a former lover. Jackson's search and Tracy's quest intertwine as Jackson's questions make the Leeds police force increasingly nervous. It becomes clear that the 1975 murder case Tracy worked on is far from solved and has had lasting repercussions.The sleuthing is less important than Atkinson's fascinating take on the philosophic and emotional dimensions of her characters' lives.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
