Review: 'Big Sky,' by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's "Big Sky," the fifth in her series of literary detective novels featuring ex-soldier, ex-policeman and private detective Jackson Brodie, is, like the others, wonderfully written, irresistibly suspenseful and offhandedly funny, its wildly eventful plot so chock full of coincidence and convenience that, looked at from arm's length, it seems delightfully silly — yet so attuned to human foibles that it feels utterly genuine.

Brodie has relocated to Yorkshire, on England's east coast, and set up shop as Brodie Investigations, where the majority of his work is following cheating spouses. His ex-partner Julia is nearby, filming the long-running police procedural in which she plays a pathologist; so their 13-year-old son Nathan and aged family Labrador retriever Dido are occasionally in his care, well-placed for many touching moments of comic relief — and, in Julia's case, firmly lodged in Jackson's psyche, always ready with an ironic comment.

In short order we meet Crystal, who has put a tawdry past behind her to become the trophy wife of Tommy Holroyd, the wealthy owner of a haulage business, stepmother to his bookish 16-year-old son Harry (whose own mother … fell off a cliff? hmmm), and mother to the Disney-enchanted 3-year-old Candy; Andy, a friend and associate of Tommy's; and Vince, their sad-sack "golf friend."

Vince, in the middle of a divorce, has lost his house, his job and his (company) car. When his soon-to-be-ex-wife turns up murdered, his despair takes him to the edge of a cliff (literally) — where Jackson, out for a run, finds him and is (literally) catapulted into the emerging story. "But then [Jackson] never needed to look for trouble, as Julia frequently reminded him, trouble would always find him."

Lurking in the background all along is the case, closed 10 years ago, of onetime worthies Antonio Bassani and Michael Carmody, who "liked kids. They liked kids too much. They liked handing kids around to other men who liked kids too much." The decrepit Carmody, we learn, is up for early (compassionate) release.

We have also briefly encountered two charming young Polish sisters being lured to England for "hospitality work." And with Jackson, we have seen a hitchhiking young girl sporting a unicorn- and rainbow-bedazzled backpack hopping into a stranger's car. So the atmosphere is thick with a certain sort of menace. Never have the notes of "The Teddy Bears' Picnic," tinkling from an ice cream van on the Esplanade, seemed quite so ominous.

What are the dark secrets of Crystal's childhood? What is Tommy really hauling? Where does Andy's money come from — so much more than this bed-and-breakfast could possibly make that he has to invest it in designer purses and watches that, just to be safe, he pretends are fakes? And how is Steve Mellors, a lawyer Jackson sometimes works for, involved?

When Crystal hires Jackson to find out who's following her, the tangle of story lines begins to resolve into one elaborate web of a plot.

Following one of those story lines, an old acquaintance of Jackson's, now a detective, stumbles over him, and, "Finding Jackson Brodie at the heart of this melee seemed par for the course, somehow," she thinks. "He was a friend to anarchy."

Jackson's own take is more benign, if equally resigned: He might be no good at being a shepherd, "but sometimes he was all there was."

Ellen Akins is a writer in Wisconsin. She teaches and coaches through the Loft Literary Center website.

Big Sky
By: Kate Atkinson.
Publisher: Little, Brown, 391 pages, $28.