Big Sky – Kate Atkinson

 Jackson Brodie has washed up on the North Yorkshire coast where his business, Brodie Investigations, is turning over a living pursuing the missing and the adulterous, around Scarborough, Whitby and Bridlington. His actress ex-wife, Julia, is filming locally, so Jackson has the occasional help or hindrance of teenage son, Nathan, and Labrador dog, Dido.

There is no attempt here to summarise the story; the plotting and delivery are excellent, but secondary to the characterisation. It is quite a cast, starting with three golfing buddies: Tommy Holroyd, alpha male, successful haulier, into his luxury lifestyle with trophy wife, Crystal (of whom more later); Andy Bragg, more beta, second fiddle to his wife in their hotel business, but with a lucrative side line in arranging travel and job placements for young foreign females who want to work in the ‘hospitality’ industry; and Vincent Ives, definitely gamma, recently separated from wife, Wendy, subsequently moved out of the marital bungalow into a seedy bedsit, and to cap it all, now made redundant.

Tommy’s wife, Crystal, has a past to put behind her and she will put up with Tommy for the comfort and security he provides. Her emotional capital is invested in baby daughter, Candice, and teenage stepson, Harry. Harry’s interests are not trucks and golf, but books and theatre. He works part time at the vampire attraction and volunteers backstage at the pier theatre, helping the resident acts – washed up comic, Barclay Jack and rising drag queen, Bunny Hopps. Add to this two young female detective constables, Ronnie and Reggie, on a low key trawl for information on a historic abuse case.

It is a heady mix and Kate Atkinson lights the blue touch paper and fireworks ensue. Plots develop, twist, interweave; murky pasts emerge and uncertain futures beckon.

And through it all, Jackson Brodie plods like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern through Hamlet, a bit part player, never quite up to speed, but in at the death. Despite working on the periphery of events, his pithy commentary on life, punctuated by imagined dialogue with Julia, is central and, more often than not, funny.