Part of Jackson Brodie
First published 2010
Tracy Waterhouse spent years as a police detective. Now she manages a shopping center and keeps her days predictable. That changes when she spots Kelly Cross hauling a small child through town. Both of them look wretched. Tracy makes a decision on the spot, hands over cash, and walks away with the girl. She has no idea what she is doing as a parent, but that turns out to be the smaller problem. Larger forces are already moving toward her and the child, and they have nothing to do with inexperience. Across town, Jackson Brodie, the detective familiar to readers of Case Histories, is pulling a different kind of rescue off. He takes in an abused dog and thinks that is the end of it. It is not. Tracy and Jackson are running parallel tracks, each convinced they did the right thing, each about to find out what that costs. Kate Atkinson keeps the two stories close without forcing them together too soon, and the result is a novel that is funny and tense and quietly sad all at once.
Genres: literary-fiction, domestic-fiction, mystery, crime, contemporary, thriller
Vibes: darkly-humorous, emotionally-complex, introspective, quietly-sad, tense
Tropes: found-family, parallel-storylines, rescue-gone-wrong, unreliable-judgment
Setting: shopping center, town
Period: contemporary
350 pages · Hardcover · Doubleday & Co Inc.
Content warnings: abuse, child-abuse, kidnapping