Watch Out, Inspector: Parallel Plots Collide
By JANET MASLIN writing in the New York Times,Published: September 21, 2008

WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS?
By Kate Atkinson
388 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.

A dog runs alongside a little girl on the front cover of Kate Atkinson’s “When Will There Be Good News?” The same picture of the same dog also appears on the book’s spine. Why does it crop up twice? Possibly because dogs sell books lately. More likely because everything in this novel has at least one sneaky parallel or doppelgänger. And the book is so full of gamesmanship that a bit of it spills into the cover art.

“When Will There Be Good News?” follows Ms. Atkinson’s “Case Histories” and “One Good Turn,” books that would be chronologically linked if Ms. Atkinson had a simple sense of chronology. It’s true that the nominal main character, a quirky detective named Jackson Brodie, has a story that advances straight through the three books. But everything around him has been rearranged. In “Case Histories,” Brodie was investigating a grisly crime in Cambridge, England. By the time of “One Good Turn,” he was in Edinburgh, romantically involved with an actress named Julia, part of the victimized family from the first story.

Read the full review at the New York Times online.

Footnote:

This title has had a lot of exposure, especially after the author's appearance at the Christchurch Writers Festival, on this blog so it is interesting to read the first of the US reviews.