Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

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Reviewed by Harriet

He had spent a good two weeks being sensible and mature, and then he bought a Land Rover Defender instead. It was a rugged, blokey kind of vehicle….Cost an arm and a leg. No regrets. You could live in a Defender if you had to, but you couldn’t drive a house. The whole macho construct only slightly spoiled by his grand-daughter’s baby seat in the back.

In my review of Kate Atkinson’s Blue Sky, I said readers had been waiting for ten years since her last novel featuring private detective Jackson Brodie. That was in 2019, and there’s been another long wait for Jackson to reappear. But here he is at last, older (‘at the wrong side of sixty’) but otherwise unchanged. His life has not been very exciting or challenging of late, so when he’s called to a small Yorkshire town by a middle-aged brother and sister who have discovered the theft of a small but probably valuable Renaissance painting, he goes up there to take a look. The prime suspect is their late mother’s carer, but she’s disappeared, and the couple are curiously unwilling to call in the police. Meanwhile, another painting has been stolen elsewhere – this one in Burton Makepeace, whose owners have converted part of  their crumbling stately home into a hotel, and are running murder mystery weekends, all to help pay for the upkeep of their large estate. Interestingly, the suspect here is the young woman helper, of whom the matriarch, Lady Milton, was very fond. This time the police are called in, and the investigating office proves to be Reggie Chase, a young woman who has worked with Jackson in the past. Their relationship has soured, so she’s not very happy when Jackson appears on the scene, arguing that two disappearing paintings, both presumably stolen by a young woman employee, must be linked: ‘a coincidence is only an explanation waiting to happen’. 

In lesser hands this could have turned into a perfectly acceptable though perhaps not terribly exciting crime novel. But this is Kate Atkinson, so she’s having a huge amount of fun. As many reviewers have pointed out, she’s flung in most of the tropes of a traditional country house murder mystery, complete with a vicar, a wounded army veteran, an eccentric lady of the manor, an axe murderer at large in the surrounding countryside, and a blizzard which traps all the characters in the house with no way of contacting the outside world. If matters weren’t complicated enough, the cast of the murder mystery weekend turn up, as do four guests, all of whom have struggled though the snow before the house was cut off. The actors feel duty bound to go ahead with the show despite the minimal audience, which adds to the complications as the gun shots and dead bodies in the performance get confused with the real shots and dead bodies elsewhere in the building. 

Atkinson is always entertaining, but in this one she’s excelled herself. I had a smile on my face all the way through. Apparently Atkinson said in a recent interview that she’d set out intending to write a dark novel but this one just got the better of her. And what a good thing it did. You might think the characters were stereotypes, but they come to life in a way that outdoes Agatha Christie, bless her. Ben, the Army Major, learning to cope with the loss of his leg in Afghanistan and struggling with mild PTSD,  gets lost in the snow and stumbles into Burton Makepeace to to find the family trying to dispose of the body of old Nanny, who has fallen downstairs – a wheelbarrow and a distant empty room seem to be the best solution. Simon the vicar has lost his faith many years ago, and subsequently loses the power of speech, so he can’t report his discovery of a dead body when he calls 999; his great hope is that he’ll be reincarnated as a tree. And then there’s Lady Milton, frequently confused (she takes Ben to be a substitute butler, something he finds it easier to play along with), wandering round the house carrying a pistol; despite often appearing muddled, she has a surprising sharpness which sometimes comes in useful. And then of course there’s Reggie, who owes a great deal to Jackson but has complicated feelings about him. And there’s Jackson himself, whose creation has been described by Atkinson thus:

Keep him simple, I thought. Jackson likes cars and gadgets and occasionally hitting things..… He’s not quite as witless as I’m making him sound – he also feels the imperative to look after people, particularly women, children and dogs, and his soul runs deeper on the inside than it appears on the outside. He’s quite gallant, in fact.

If you’ve read any or all of the preceding five Jackson Brodie books you’ll be delighted to meet him again. If you haven’t, there’s no time like the present. 

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Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.

Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday, 2024). 978-0857526571, 336pp., hardback.

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