Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

Doubleday | 2019 (18 June) | 368p | Bought copy | Buy the book

Jackson Brodie, once a police detective and now a private investigator, has moved to a seaside village in north Yorkshire where he shares responsibility for his son and dog with his ex-partner. It’s an arrangement that works, for now. Jackson is currently at work trying to prove the infidelity of a client’s husband but everything begins to shift when Jackson comes across a desperate man on the edge of a crumbling cliff.

Jackson isn’t the only person interested in this man and his life. Detective constables Ronnie and Reggie are investigating the background to a troubling case, which involves terrible crimes. And then there’s the murder. Patterns emerge, coincidences confuse, in a soup of lies, secrets and deceit.

Big Sky is the first of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels that I’ve read. How that came about I have no idea because I adore her recent novels. Here’s an author whom I trust and I knew it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t have read the others. And it didn’t but I’ll definitely be reading them now. I need to meet these people again.

The story is brilliantly constructed and told. There are so many threads to it, so many seemingly unrelated characters. We see events through the eyes of more than one, including our man on the cliff. But it doesn’t confuse in the slightest due to this author’s considerable skill. It does, however, amaze. If you’ve read earlier novels you’ll enjoy seeing familiar faces, to catch up with them all these years later, but each of them is given such life and depth that new readers will have no trouble falling for them. Ugliness can be found here in a story that at times grips the heart. But there is also hope and innocence. I adore Reggie and Ronnie.

Jackson Brodie operates almost in the shadows, sometimes on the wrong side of the right way to do things. His methods are unorthodox and he can place himself away and apart from the emotion, but we know he cares, that he worries. There are people here that need to be worried about, who need Jackson’s help.

Big Sky is a magnificent novel, not just for its excellent plot and beautiful, elegant prose, but also for its insight into human behaviour and motives. People here can do bad things, even when they don’t want to and know it’s wrong. That doesn’t make their behaviour any less evil, but it does make them interesting. There’s a battle between good and evil – Reggie and Ronnie (so brilliantly named) are the angels. Jackson is there to mete out justice and the way in which this novel comes together is jawdropping and marvellous.

Kate Atkinson is one of the very finest authors at work today. Big Sky Shows yet again why. I’ll be sure not to let this series pass me by again and I urge you to read it. This is undoubtedly one of my top books of the year. And it’s a beautiful hardback, with no fewer than two ribbons! Irresistible, inside and out.

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