It has been five years since the award-winning Kate Atkinson last gifted us a Jackson Brodie novel, in Big Sky. Now her private investigator, who has “climbed to the wrong side of 60”, is back, and it is a real joy to see him again. Death at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday) throws Brodie into the middle of an Agatha Christie-esque mystery when he is hired by elderly siblings to find a painting that has gone missing from their late mother’s wall. Brodie discovers parallels with the theft of a Turner painting from a nearby stately home. As he is wont to say, “a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen”, and he’s delighted to discover that old friend Reggie Chase, the orphan who saved his life back in When Will There Be Good News?, was in charge of that investigation. Reggie is less pleased – “we’re not a partnership, we’re not ‘Brodie and Chase, Detectives’,” she tells him – but they are soon back in harness when a handy snowstorm means they’re trapped in the stately home, along with a cast of vicars, butlers, majors, aged dowagers, etc, of whom Christie would be proud. An axe murderer stalks the moors, there’s a body in the pantry and a cast of actors on the loose.
This stands alone as a crime novel, but it is better enjoyed having read the previous books in the Brodie series. And why wouldn’t you, anyway – they are all a delight. I defy you not to snort with laughter as the novel progresses to its farcical denouement. Atkinson is just brilliant.
