Case Histories is the first Jackson Brodie novel by Kate Atkinson, author of Shrines of Gaiety, Transcription, and Life After Life. She’s a marvellous writer but I have only read some standalone titles, not any of her series. In Case Histories, we are introduced to Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, who is following three 30-year-old cold cases, each unconnected but set in Cambridge.
In the first case, we read of a little girl Olivia who disappears in the night. In the second, a young office worker Laura falls victim to a maniac’s knife attack. And in the third, a new mother Michelle is overcome by anger and postpartum depression and brutally kills her husband with an axe.
Jackson attempts to unravel these unusual cases but as he pulls one thread, he realizes there is a great web at work. Olivia grew up in a house that shares a back lane with a current client, Binky Rain. Olivia and her sisters thought of Binky Rain as the witch. Are her missing cats linked to missing girls? Laura’s father Theo was the intended target of the attack, or was he? When Theo ends up having an asthma attack in a park, it is Olivia’s sisters who save him and call for the ambulance. In the same hospital, but in the ICU department, works Michelle’s younger sister Shirley, who has also come to Jackson for help. It’s an strange set of cases, not linked in the past, but with connections in the present.