When Will There Be Good News? (2008)

Hay momentos imposibles de olvidar, y aunque hayan pasado treinta años desde entonces, Joanna aun recuerda el sendero en el campo y la tarde de verano en que un hombre de repente se acercó a su madre y a sus hermanos y acabó con la vida de toda la familia. Ella, una niña de seis años, consiguió huir y ahora es una mujer que intenta llevar una vida apacible con su marido y su hijo. Mientras Joanna trabaja, el bebé se queda al cuidado de Reggie, una adolescente que ya ha aprendido a bregar con el dolor. Las cosas parecen transcurrir de la mejor de las maneras, hasta que un buen día el pasado vuelve para presentar factura: Joanna y el niño desaparecen sin dejar rastro y quien se ve involucrado en la investigación de este extraño caso es Jackson Brodie, un hombre adorablemente imperfecto que trabaja como detective y siempre acaba confundiendo profesión y vida privada.

Case Histories was great. One Good Turn was fine. This one is just okay.
Same as in the previous books the plot here basically exists and moves along on consequences happenning, but as it's already a third book like that it's sort of loses credibility.
I gotta say I like Louise Monroe very much - with all her misanthropy and commitment issues, but I don't think I'll be reading more of this series even for her. ( )

Well written storybased on mixed-up identities following a train crash ( )

Jackson Brodie, the hard-luck, accident-prone protagonist, is fond of saying that a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen. And indeed, there are enough coincidences in this, the third of Atkinson’s detective yarns, to make any Dickens novel seem like a random assemblage of haphazard occurrences.
In a sense, this trait helps Atkinson tell an intricate, action-filled tale involving multiple narrative strands with a small cast of characters. And what characters! Louise Munroe, Edinburgh detective chief inspector, Brodie’s counterpart in every way, returns from the previous book in the series. In addition, a new character, Reggie Chase, finds herself at the nexus of many of the said coincidences. I hope she returns in the next book. What about Joanna Hunter, supreme survivor? Even lesser characters are memorable, for instance, Reggie’s tutor, Ms. MacDonald, who drives “in the way an excitable and short-sighted chimpanzee might have done.”
Atkinson never gets around to transforming some of the coincidences into explanations, but I didn’t care. This was a page-turner. ( )

(54) Another whimsical installment in Atkinson's Jackson Brodie mystery series - this one read back to back with 'One Good Turn.' Both books are running together a bit. It seems a theme - several unconnected storylines that eventually come together. In this one Jackson (now estranged from Julia) and the policewoman he met in the last novel, Louise, are drawn into a missing persons case. A doctor who was a childhood survivor of the massacre of her family has gone missing on the very day the perpetrator has been released from prison. But what is this? - there is also a deadly train crash, an orphan teen, and lots of spouses who don't seem to be behaving as one would expect. It is crazy and charming (charming, a murder mystery?) and all works out in the end.

I really enjoy these novels while I am reading them but somehow they fall just slightly short of the mark as they finish. Just a bit twee. But the writing is excellent and atmospheric. I thought the train crash was very well done and Ms McNaughton and her denouement were very well-drawn. I did not like the whole thing with Louise and Jackson all of a sudden having spouses - it felt very contrived and formulaic. But the book was just what I needed at a busy time. Such a well-written escape as I have pretty well come to expect from Atkinson who has got to be right up there with my favorite writers at this point.

I am not sure I am ready to read the next book in close proximity, but I will definitely keep reading the series. Such fun. ( )