When Will There Be Good News?

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

-When Will There Be Good News?

When was the last time you read the word "rackety," excepting the paragraph above? I'm not sure if I ever have. Such a delicious word, too - one of the many, many things on the long, long list of things I love about Kate Atkinson's writing. (The praise of North and South at the expense of Wuthering Heights also makes the list, naturally.)

When Will There Be Good News? picks up some time after the events of Atkinson's previous novel, One Good Turn, and also features former private detective Jackson Brodie and Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe. Like Atkinson's two prior mysteries (Case Histories was the first in which Jackson figured), When Will There Be Good News? is set in Edinburgh and told through the use of intertwining narratives: in this case, those of Jackson and Louise, as well as that of newcomer Reggie Chase. Reggie is a 16-year-old girl who could have easily slipped through the cracks. Instead, she's found work as a "mother's help" for a high-powered doctor and looks upon the doctor and her baby as a surrogate family. Perhaps that's why Reggie can't rest when the doctor vanishes and no one, not even the doctor's husband, seems to be worried. Of course, Reggie doesn't know that the doctor survived a brutal childhood tragedy that shattered her family, and that the man responsible has just been released from prison...

Reggie's hunt for the missing (...or is she?) doctor leads her to Louise, who's preoccupied with a domestic violence case as well as her misgivings about her own marriage; Reggie finds Jackson after a horrific train crash*. Atkinson manages to weave all of the stories together quite expertly. It's just a brilliantly constructed book, and I'm awed by the way Atkinson created three characters so well realized and orchestrated their interactions so beautifully. Jackson, Louise, and Reggie are all extremely tough - they'd have to be, to deal with the events of this book as well as to survive what we know of their lives before this point. They also seem so vulnerable, though, because Atkinson allows us to know them so intimately. It's very impressive. I basically want to be her when I grow up.

Also, I just love love love Reggie Chase, in case that wasn't clear. She's a wonderful heroine, scrappy and tenacious, and I was in her corner from the get-go. That reminds me: I need to see an adaptation of this on PBS's Mystery!, like, yesterday. They can start with Case Histories, but I think this is actually my favorite of the series so far - that's pretty exciting, when you think about it.

Up next: One Step Behind by Henning Mankell. It's part of the Wallander series, which I do not seem to be reading in any particular order (this book is set several years after the last one I read, but there were several in between). I actually did see an adaptation of this on Mystery!, but I seem to have done a good enough job of forgetting the particulars so as to be quite puzzled by the case - which is good, I guess, for entertainment purposes, though it doesn't speak too well of my memory.

*I find it strange how patterns can crop up in books one reads. For example, this is the second book I've read recently to deal with the aftermath of a train crash (Drood also had one). When I read American Wife and Admission back to back, I noticed that both mentioned the Princeton P-rade, something I had been entirely ignorant of before. Funny.