![]() ![]() ![]() In a way, his wish is granted: Case Histories is essentially a balancing act, with evil and ignorance stacked opposite truth and healing. ![]() ![]() How easy life would be if it could be one and the same thing." "Amelia and Julia Land had found something," he thinks, reflecting on two sisters' discovery of their lost infant sibling's favourite toy. Jackson's fuzzy, semi-articulated desire to right the world's wrongs acts as a counterweight to the brutal deeds committed by faceless figures. Asked by the obese and eternally grieving Theo Wyre to find his daughter's murderer, Jackson takes on the near-hopeless task. He is a reluctant detective, yet he has an ineluctable conscience. Jackson swims into the diminishing ripples of the three cases - all of which happened more than a decade ago - and begins to work out what really happened. What's more, she addresses the balance by immediately bringing in the central character, Jackson, a private eye (ex-police) and all-round good bloke, if a touch bitter and cynical - which is really what you want in your private eyes. Atkinson is very good indeed, and she makes her tragedies unbearably small-scale and human - never gory. To start your novel with three such shocking set-pieces is brave, and, if you're good, effective: it bludgeons the reader into a state of mild depression that cries out for closure. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |