It seems that everyone is talking about Kate Atkinson’s new novel, A God in Ruins, at the moment – and that’s definitely a book I would like to read soon, as I loved Life After Life – but I’m also still working through her Jackson Brodie series, of which this book, When Will There Be Good News?, is the third.

The story opens with a tragedy: the murder of a mother and two of her three children as they walk home through the countryside on a beautiful summer’s day. Six-year-old Joanna, who witnesses the brutal attack, is the sole survivor. Thirty years later, Joanna is living in Edinburgh where she is now a doctor with a successful practice and mother of a beloved baby son. She has managed to put the horrors of her childhood behind her and build a new life for herself, but how will she react when she hears that the man who murdered her family is about to be released from prison?

Another character with a troubled past is sixteen-year-old Reggie (short for Regina) Chase, Joanna’s ‘mother’s help’. Reggie is alone in the world apart from her criminal brother, Billy, and the only bright spots in her life are her friendship with Joanna and her love of ancient literature (she has left school but is continuing to study Greek and Latin in private sessions with an eccentric retired teacher, Ms MacDonald). When Joanna and her baby disappear, Reggie is sure something terrible must have happened and she can’t understand why nobody else seems to be worried.

Like the previous two books in this series (Case Histories and One Good Turn), the plot is built around coincidences, chance encounters and interlinking storylines. This is how our old friend Jackson Brodie is brought into the story; accidentally boarding a train heading north towards Edinburgh instead of south to London, he finds himself caught up in a rail disaster which brings him into contact not only with Reggie but also with Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, one of his love interests from One Good Turn. It was nice to meet Jackson and Louise again, but the real star of this book is Reggie, possibly my favourite character to appear in the series so far.

I find Kate Atkinson’s books very quick, addictive reads – despite enjoying them so much that I don’t really want to reach the end, I just can’t seem to read them slowly! As I’ve mentioned before, her books are not conventional crime novels. Crimes are committed and investigated, but the focus tends to be on the impact the crimes have on the characters, and the events and relationships that arise as a result. Each time I’ve finished a Jackson Brodie novel I’ve found that it’s not the plot I remember, but the characters. They are so well developed and so human, with hopes and dreams, likes and dislikes, doubts and worries that any reader will be able to identify with.

This is probably the darkest book of the series so far, with so many tragedies, disasters and accidents that I could certainly understand why it was given the title When Will There Be Good News? The book is not without some humour and lighter moments, though, so don’t let that put you off reading it! I now have only one more Jackson Brodie novel to read (Started Early, Took My Dog), but I may be tempted to read A God in Ruins first – or is there another Kate Atkinson book you think I really need to read without delay?

My first introduction to Kate Atkinson’s work was Life After Life, which I read in 2013 and loved. I’ve been wanting to read more of her books and knowing that a lot of people speak very highly of her Jackson Brodie novels, I decided to start with the first one in the series, Case Histories.

In Case Histories, private detective Jackson Brodie is investigating three old cases that have remained unresolved for years:

Case History No. 1 – During the summer heatwave of 1970, three-year-old Olivia Land is sleeping in a tent in the garden with her older sister, Amelia. When Amelia wakes up, she finds that Olivia has disappeared without trace.

Case History No. 2 – In 1994, eighteen-year-old Laura Wyre is murdered on her first day working in her father’s office. Her killer has still not been found and no motive for the attack has ever been discovered.

Case History No. 3 – In 1979, Michelle Fletcher is living on an isolated farm with her new husband and baby daughter. Depressed, lonely and finding it hard to cope, an argument with her husband ends in a brutal murder.

The connection between these three stories is Jackson Brodie, who is contacted by family members hoping to have the cases reopened or looked at again. Amelia and Julia Land want to find out what happened to their little sister, Olivia, and whether she could still be alive; Laura’s father, Theo, wants to know who killed his beloved daughter and why; and Shirley Morrison is searching for her sister Michelle’s daughter, with whom she lost contact after the incident which tore their family apart. But Jackson has problems of his own and as he begins to investigate these three very different crimes, he is reminded of a tragedy in his own past and another ‘lost girl’ who disappeared from his life decades earlier.

I loved Case Histories. I know describing a book as unputdownable is a cliché, but it was true in this case – it really is the sort of book where once you start reading, you don’t want to stop until you reach the end. It’s a crime novel I would recommend even to readers who are not really interested in crime fiction because, while the three mysteries are quite interesting, the real strength of the book is in the characterisation. The story is not so much about the crimes themselves as about the effect they had on the people involved and how they have tried (and often failed) to move on from what has happened.

I liked Jackson and am looking forward to meeting him again in the rest of the series, but my favourites in this book were Amelia and Theo. Amelia, who is approaching middle age feeling friendless and unwanted, has invented an imaginary boyfriend to brighten up her non-existent social life, and Theo, for whom his daughter was the centre of his universe, is neglecting his health while he devotes his life to finding her killer, drawing up colour-coded charts of her friends and teachers and making yearly pilgrimages to the scene of her death. Their lives are sad, lonely and tragic, yet Atkinson injects just enough humour into their stories to turn them into characters who are amusing but not ridiculous, flawed but sympathetic.

I also thought the structure of the book was interesting, because the timeline is not entirely linear. We see events from one perspective in one chapter, then in the next chapter we go back several hours, days or weeks to see those same events from another character’s perspective, filling in gaps and adding to our knowledge of what is going on. Two of the case histories – Olivia’s disappearance and Laura’s murder – worked very well alongside each other, but the third one, involving Michelle and her sister, felt disconnected from the others and didn’t work quite as well. I think I had expected all three cases to be much more closely linked than they actually were and I was disappointed that they weren’t.

At the end of the book, after Jackson is sure he’s solved the crimes, there are still more twists to come. We are given enough information throughout the story so that we can guess at what may have happened and work out some parts of the mystery, but the final pieces of the puzzle are withheld from us until the very end.

That’s two Kate Atkinson books read and two enjoyed; now I can’t wait to read the second book in the Jackson Brodie series, One Good Turn.