Audiobook Available. Atkinson continues her streak of writing interesting characters with empathetic Brodie at the heart. This time we start two years after the end of the first novel, and Brodie is hanging around the Edinburgh festival where his girlfriend is in a terrible production.
Until, of course, seemingly unrelated things start to get tied together: a road-rage incident; a disappearing corpse in Cramond Island… Atkinson is truly gifted at weaving together incidents and characters in a unique way as we once again find ourselves rooting for Brodie in a professional and personal capacity.
A perfect title, really, for the cynicism woven throughout the series, as once again we get multiple incidents separated by decades: a violent attack on a mother and young children while picnicking, with only a six-year-old survivor; a train crash; Brodie stealing a toddlers' hair for paternity testing; the family murderer set to be released from prison; the now-adult survivor disappearing…We bounce between Yorkshire and Edinburgh as strangers' lives continue to intersect with multiple plots and stories being woven together.
Bonus points if you immediately recognized the title as an Emily Dickinson poem! And finally, we have the recent release, which fans waited almost a decade for! Thirty years before the beginning of this novel, a six-year old girl accidentally witnesses a brutal crime—and now the man who was convicted of that crime is released from prison….
The fourth novel in The Jackson Brodie Series—Started Early, Took My Dog—deviates slightly from the others in the series in that this time Jackson Brodie himself witness the catalyst event that sets the big chain of events in order.
In this novel, Atkinson again tackles the themes of confusion and identity while the readers follow the on-and-off-confused Tracy and Jackson. Although the crimes and the progression of the mystery is an important part of each novel, Atkinson gives a lot more attention to her characters—to their thoughts, their lives, their choices, etc.
Atkinson also slips in and out of a more stream of consciousness-like narration, which can annoy some readers. Each series [season] of the show has three episodes, and each episode is about an hour in length. Each series also breaks down one of The Jackson Brodie series novels; for example, the three episodes of series 1 cover the events in book 1, Case Histories. As with the novels, those who have watched the TV series are divided into those who loved it and those who hated it.
However, many of those who hated it went into the show expecting a procedural crime drama like Criminal Minds or Law and Order —but Case Histories is not that kind of show. The stories, as they are in the novels are much more character driven and focus more on developing the characters than on making the mystery blow your mind. A majority of those who have watched the show expecting more characterization and drama and less criminal procedurals seem to have enjoyed it a lot more than those who expect the vice versa.
All in all, The Jackson Brodie series is an excellent look at characterization and an example of how mysteries can also have strong character depth as well as mind-boggling puzzles. The links beside each book title will take you to Amazon where you can read more about the book, or purchase it.
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Any issues with the book list you are seeing? Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists…. Two series have been broadcast, with six episodes in the first series and three in the second. A complex and compulsive detective surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel disparate case histories.
The series, which also starred Victoria Wood, Amanda Abbington and Natasha Little, is set amidst the iconic landscapes of modern Edinburgh, bringing to screen the delightful jigsaw puzzles of Kate Atkinson's novels and the complexity of her hero Jackson Brodie. A former soldier and policeman, Jackson's tough-guy exterior belies a deeply empathetic heart.
He's unable to resist coming to the rescue and is a magnet for the bereaved, the lost and the dysfunctional. Full of entertaining and original characters, each two part story is warm, poignant and life-affirming, enjoying humour whilst exploring the darkness that underpins each crime mystery.
Case Histories is a detective series set in contemporary Edinburgh, adapted from Kate Atkinson's best-selling novels and devised for television by Ashley Pharoah creator of Life on Mars.
Intriguing, moving and funny, the character driven stories conjure up a richly imagined world in which Jackson Brodie attempts to bring resolution to the victims of unexplained mysteries and comfort to the survivors of personal tragedies.
Add to all that literary, emotional and anthropological excellence the fact that, in Jackson, she had created a Mr Rochester for the modern age, a post-modern, romantic fantasy figure of a man that countless hordes of women all over the world quasi-worship, and it's easy to imagine why I flirted with dodging the bullet and watching someone else be the focus of the inevitable disappointment.
In the end it was that: the prospect of someone else, some other lucky bastard, trudging the streets in Jackson's battered shoes that did it. It was unconscionable. I decided to have faith in the invisible tendrils of intrigue, horror and hope that Kate's writing wraps around the hearts and minds of her fans. Maybe great stories are great stories in any medium, if you just get out of the way. It seems from the responses to the series that, at the very least, we've driven even more people to discover her effortless sorry Kate - seemingly effortless prose.
Her satirist's eye, the minute observations that reveal everything about a person through the most innocuous gesture or phrase, the mischievous and audacious use of coincidence, the telescoping of time and experience can obviously work even in the literal, linear 2D world of television. But let's not fool ourselves: she's a writer.
Of books. Wildly and justifiably popular and engaging ones. We just rode her coat tails.
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