In
Big Sky, Kate Atkinson manages to create a wonderfully engaging cast of
characters, each with a life of their own. Everyone in her books has a
personality, they are memorable, and they are there for a purpose.
Even the aging
dog, Dido, who is dragged around with our hero, Jackson Brodie, has a presence.
Dido is used to show a flicker of humanity in Jackson’s carefully sketched son,
Nathan, the perfect bored teenager, the roller of eyes, the yawner. Atkinson’s
trademark humor is threaded throughout.
This book contains several nasty, complex plots, and in the middle
of them, we find Jackson cutting a gentle swathe through the bad guys. He solves
the mysteries, or happens to be there when they are solved, and generally sets
wrongs to right without gunplay or car chases (well, maybe the odd one, but
only under duress). He is the perfect reluctant hero in the perfect book.
'The stand-out read of the summer. It's a masterclass in brilliant writing and whether you've read the earlier books in the series or not, you'll enjoy it.' Independent
'Like all good detectives, he is a hero for men and women alike.' The Times
'Laced with Atkinson's sharp, dry humour, and one of the joys of the Brodie novels has always been that they are so funny.' Observer
Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son Nathan and ageing Labrador Dido, both at the discretion of his former…
November
Road, for me, is a book of people. Each character struggles with morality in
their own way.
Frank Guidry, the central character, is a fixer, and sometimes a
little more if it means saving himself. Guidry’s big, easy life in New Orleans
is about to change. He knows it instinctively, he’s in danger, and he has to
run. Charlotte Roy must also run to take her two young daughters and flee
from an alcoholic husband and a suffocating life.
They meet on the road, and
Guidry finds what he’s always been looking for in Charlotte, a reason to live,
just when life has never been so precarious for him. I read this book over and
over again.
Set against the assassination of JFK, a poignant and evocative crime novel that centers on a desperate cat-and-mouse chase across 1960s America-a story of unexpected connections, daring possibilities, and the hope of second chances from the Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone.
Frank Guidry's luck has finally run out.
A loyal street lieutenant to New Orleans' mob boss Carlos Marcello, Guidry has learned that everybody is expendable. But now it's his turn-he knows too much about the crime of the century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Within hours of JFK's murder, everyone with ties to…
Robert
Harris has created a complex tale from historical truths. And once again, it is the people—the characters who inhabit this book make it special.
Thomas Jericho is on the edge. It’s 1943, and he has suffered a breakdown trying
to crack the Enigma code, solve the mystery of his missing girlfriend, and simultaneously grapple with his own demons. He is so finely drawn and
desperately fragile that we wonder how he can go on, yet he does.
Jericho
exists in the grim yet wonderfully atmospheric setting of wartime England as we
move from Cambridge to Bletchley Park. This beautifully written book is a spy
thriller, a love story, and a murder mystery all in one.
It is 1943, and a team of cryptanalysts led by Tom Jericho have broken the Enigma code of Hitler's U-boats. But inside the code-breaking centre, a woman disappears and authorities suspect the presence of a traitor, it is only when Jericho himself falls under suspicion that he must unmask the spy.
Belfast,
Northern Ireland: spring 2017. Retired Chief Inspector Patrick Mullan is found
brutally murdered in his bed. Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride and his
partner are called to a desolate country house to investigate. Here they
discover a man whose career was overshadowed by violence and corruption. Is the
killer someone from Mullan’s past, or his present? And who hated the man enough
to kill him twice?
Is
it one of Patrick Mullan’s own family, all of them hiding a history of abuse?
Or a vengeful crime boss and his psychopathic new employee? Perhaps a recently
released prisoner desperate to protect his family? Set in Belfast and the
richly atmospheric countryside around it, Ryan and his partner face another
complex investigation with wit and intelligence.
