Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, but not Atkinson's best

I have enjoyed all of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, but this one perhaps a little less than its predecessors.

As always, Atkinson uses the detective plot largely as a device on which to hang her brilliant character portraits (or case studies). This time, Jackson has been hired to find the real origins of a woman in New Zealand who was adopted in the mid 1970s in Leeds shortly before her adoptive parents emigrated. He becomes involved in a story of ancient malfeasance and murder, tangled up with a present-day imbroglio involving elderly police officers, an abducted child and – almost wholly irrelevantly – and old actress who is succumbing to Alzheimers.

The writing is excellent, of course, and the character studies are again penetrating and exceptionally well drawn. The attitudes of the 1970s are very well portrayed. The continuing arc of Jackson’s story runs through the book as a couple of loose ends from When Will There Be Good News are pursued, of not always tied up. This time, though, the plot wasn’t really sufficiently well done for me and often proved a distraction rather than an asset. There are several characters who feature in the present day and in flashback to 1975 who weren’t sufficiently well-distinguished and became a rather confusing blur to me, and the reliance on coincidence bordered on the absurd at times.

Although Started Early, Took My Dog may not be Kate Atkinson’s best, it is still a good book and significantly better than the vast slew of quite-good thrillers around at the moment and I am still very much looking forward to the next one.

(My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)