Cultural Dessert

'Death at the Sign of the Rook' by Kate Atkinson

17 October 2024

It's been five years since Kate Atkinson's last Jackson Brodie novel ('Big Sky', reviewed here in July 2019) and I had forgotten how brilliantly entertaining these light-touch crime stories are. 'Death at the Sign of the Rook', the sixth novel in the Jackson Brodie series (which I've just finished reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Jason Isaacs) is a mischievously metatextual homage to the classic country house murder mystery. Kate Atkinson effectively inserts Jackson Brodie into an Agatha Christie plot, complete with a dowager marchioness, a local vicar and a butler. Brodie finds himself a participant in a murder mystery game being staged in the present day in a stately home - but it feels like he has stepped back in time to the age of a very different kind of detective. It's an incredibly enjoyable comic novel in which even the most clichéd characters are carefully and believably drawn. And Kate Atkinson's usual technique of alternating points of view to build a plot which none of the participants fully understand proves particularly entertaining and effective. Although there are references to the earlier books in the series 'Death at the Sign of the Rook' is a self-contained story which would be enjoyable whether or not you have read the other Jackson Brodie novels.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 9:17 am