Status
Available
Series
Genres
Collection
Publication
Little, Brown and Company (2019), 400 pages
Description
Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son and an aging Labrador, both at the discretion of his ex-partner Julia. It's picturesque, but there's something darker lurking behind the scenes. Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, is fairly standard-issue, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network - and back across the path of his old friend Reggie.
Media reviews
The melancholy private detective is back for a tale of sordid crimes on the Yorkshire coast, with a sprinkle of postmodernism ...It takes its time to get going. There’s an excellently sinister opening – in a sort of pre-credits sequence... Atkinson roasts the old chestnut of “the banality of
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evil” by introducing us to evildoers in the round: their small vanities, their pragmatism, their affection for their families and loyalty to their friends....The narrative circles in its own time around the relationships and disappointments of its characters, but connections start to proliferate and secrets start to emerge.....There’s considerable vamping about with tone in Big Sky. The novel enjoys the absurdities of its genre – winks at them, even – yet manages at the same time to do a lot of work with the melancholy and absurdity of ordinary life. ...It’s a credit to Atkinson’s dexterity that despite these clashes of tone and register the novel manages to hang together, even though the subject matter – child sexual abuse, human trafficking – and the essentially comic mechanisms of the plot, its coincidences and confrontations, seem to be at odds. How seriously are we to take it all? Atkinson artfully avoids supplying or implying an answer. Show Less
Awards
Original publication date
2019-06-18