Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Book
Private detective Jackson Brodie is aging, and he can’t deny it. In fact, he bought a fancy new Land Rover with all the bells and whistles and almost recognizes it as an attempt to compensate for something. Currently single with a new grandbaby, he is back to his old work of snooping in this latest offering from Atkinson.
This time he’s investigating the theft of a painting. Nonagenarian Dorothy Padgett passed away in a small town in the north of England. When she died her caregiver, Melanie Hope, disappeared at the same time her children noticed the art was no longer hanging on their mother’s bedroom wall. Sketchy and hesitant, the Padgett twins don’t want the theft reported and this arouses Brodie’s instincts. They won’t hazard a guess to its provenance or worth, only that it was most probably from the Renaissance.
In his cursory searches he finds that another elderly woman, this time Lady Milton of the estate of Burton Makepeace. She also had a companion, Sophie Greenway, who also vanished around the same time as their JMW Turner painting which was indeed worth something. In effort to connect the dots, Brodie teams up with detective constable Reggie Chase.
Atkinson moves through a cast of characters to set the scene. There is the curate who has lost his voice and retired soldier with a prosthetic leg. Add in Lady Milton, her scheming sons who are determined to turn their ancestral home into a hotel, and a troupe of actors set to dramatize a murder mystery at Burton Makepeace. Throw in a raging snowstorm and an escaped prisoner and you have all the elements of an Agatha Christie pastiche. Jackson and Reggie must use their skills to figure out what happened to the paintings and try not to get murdered in the process.
Rollicking good fun, Death at the Sign of the Rook takes the cozy mystery and deepens it with character building. Full of humor, tricky clues, and a satisfying ending, Atkinson once again delivers a clever mystery and lots of personality. And you don’t need to have read a single Jackson Brodie novel to dive right into this one. And if you’ve read them all, be sure to check out the BBC adaptation of Jackson Brodie’s investigations called Case Histories.
∞ Author Profile
Best-selling author Kate Atkinson chiefly writes novels but has also published plays and short story collections. Born in York, she studied English literature at Dundee University. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995. This is the sixth book to feature detective Jackson Brodie. She lives in Edinburgh.
by Kate Atkinson
Publisher: Doubleday
320 Pages
$25 US
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