When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson

When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson, 388 pages.

The third book of the Jackson Brodie quartet was, in my opinion, the best of a very good lot. One of my favorite books this year.
As with Atkinson's other Brodie books, there are several separate stories that overlap and are woven together. The book starts with a savage and seemingly random killing thirty years ago. Then, switching to the present, 16 year-old Reggie recently lost her mother and is trying to get by on her own. This is made more difficult than it should be by the continuous fallout from the activities of her older brother, a sociopath. Meanwhile, our hero, former soldier, police officer, and private investigator Jackson Brodie finds himself going the wrong way and into the path of everyone else in the story. Really one of the best of mysteries.

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When Will There Be Good News? / Kate Atkinson 388 p.

I started reading Atkinson's Jackson Brodie (ex private detective) novels with Started Early, Took My Dog, so technically I'm going backward.  It hardly matters, though, since these stories are so well constructed that they work as stand-alones.  A successful physician has a terrible secret in her past.  Her teenage nanny, who has some whoppers in her own background, can't make sense of her boss's disappearance and her investigations set off an intricate chain of events.  The body count here is extremely high, to the point (almost) of ludicrousness, but Atkinson's tart dialogue and superb characters, especially that of  Reggie the babysitter, are so darned good that an extra murder here and there doesn't hurt.