Book Club/ July
Book Club: Connect the crimes in ‘Case Histories’
A struggling private detective finds himself with three disturbing cases and a common thread
Summer is the time for riveting reads that thrill you from first page to last. Which is why, this July, the choice of The Buffalo News Book Club is “Case Histories” by Kate Atkinson.
This novel has it all: “cold-case” murder mysteries, heartbroken parents, missing children, red-herring clues, lost loves, failed marriages, new relationships.
All in a setting — Cambridge, England — just exotic enough to be a mental escape.
And with a little bit of humor into the mix, to boot.
At the center of “Case Histories”— a book that won the Prix Westminster in England when it was published in 2004 — is the private detective Jackson Brodie.
Brodie is lovable in spite of his laundry list of flaws: a fretful, introspective former police officer, he has seen his marriage break up, and he is a worried father to his young daughter.
Atkinson, an Edinburgh resident who is also the author of the Whitbread-winning 1995 novel “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” says this about Brodie, as readers will meet him in the first pages of the novel:
“He’s running a relatively unsuccessful detective agency when, one after another, these three cases fall into his lap.”
The three separate strands of plot, all happening in and around Cambridge, and dating back to the 1970s, function like “mini-novels” in the book, Atkinson has said.
The cases — one a tale of a vanished child, the other a story of a murdered young woman, the last a horrific crime between a man and wife — pull Brodie in, and eventually, as he collects long-buried clues, begin to show chilling signs of connection.
But don’t take it from us.
No less an authority on great summer reading than horrormeister Stephen King had this to say about Atkinson’s novel: “ ‘Case Histories’ is the literary equivalent of a triple axel. I read it once for pleasure and then again just to see how it was done.’ ”
When it debuted, in fact, King called the book “the best novel I read this year.”
So pick up your beach bag and this book, and get reading.
Summer won’t be here forever ...
As always, we are interested in your take on “Case Histories.” Please e-mail the Book Club at bookclub@buffnews.com, or write us at The Buffalo News Book Club, Features
Dept., P. O. Box 100, Buffalo, N. Y. 14240.
Case Histories
By Kate Atkinson
Back Bay Books
336 pages,
$15
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