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| Case Histories | 
 enlarge | Author: Kate Atkinson
Publisher: Black Swan
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.03
You Save: £7.96 (100%)
New (26) Used (47) Collectible (5) from £0.03
Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 848
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 399
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0552772437
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780552772433
ASIN: 0552772437
Publication Date: August 2, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 what a crime August 13, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I loved this book. It was well written and fascinating to read. The dark part of the tale is really black and very sad, but the rest of it really made me laugh. I just couldn't put it down.
I don't usually read detective novels so if they're what you like this may not be for you, but it would be a crime if you let the negative comments of some of the other reviewers put you off. Just try it.
 Too Many Loose Ends August 8, 2007
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
The thing I most looked forward to in Case Histories was the process of deduction by which P.I Bradie solved the all the long-forgotten cases he was confronted with. It may seem a little escapist to expect all the cases to be nicely wrapped up but that is what I had hoped for and was disappointed that the book failed to deliver.
The cases are solved by Bradie in what turns out to be a very tame way. For each case he speaks to about one key witness who was (unbelievably) overlooked by the police investigation, and who, it turns out, knows everything. Very little deduction is carried out on the part of Bradie and he ends up solving the crimes largely by accident.
It is almost as if the whole 'whodunnit' part of the book was an irritation to the author - something she had to get through in order to have a plot - when the real theme of the book is the personal turmoil of her characters. Atkinson certainly has a great talent for exploring their intimate emotions and thought processes, and no doubt draws on her own experiences to add some authenticity. And although this is a very dark book but Atkinson adds a tasteful amount of well written comedy here and there to lighten the tone occasionally.
There are far too many loose ends when the book concludes. This not only applies to the cases but also the lives of the characters. Many of the clients don't get to know the truth about their cases depriving us of any coverage of their reaction or the steps they take afterwards. Even when we do get information it is often ambiguous and poorly explained. This further makes me believe that the plot was of much inferior importance to Atkinson than writing about the lives of her characters.
This is a very well written, emotional book which explores the minds of a wide range of characters. However Atkinson's heart is not in what at first seems a promising plot and the outcome is anticlimactic and disappointing.
humour with dark undercurrents July 25, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is Kate Atkinson's darkest novel to date. Underneath the multi-layered plot lurks the tragic and horrific experiences of the characters involved. The lynchpin to these gruesome events is the central character private investigator Jackson Brodie who is no stranger to personal tragedies himself. What Atkinson does so well is to lull the reader into what appears on the surface to be another humorous yarn about dysfunctional families. However there is a constant hint of darker chilling undercurrents which gradually unfold resulting in disturbing and horrendous consequences for the unsuspecting victims.
It is these twists of fate which make this novel such a compelling read from start to finish.
 Interesting plot stifled by stereotypical characterisation and appalling dialogue June 6, 2007
8 out of 15 found this review helpful
Atkinson knows how to write a plot. She holds together four disparate storylines in this book, intertwining them to bring out the backstory for each and working them towards the conclusion. Each story is well paced and written in a manner that keeps you interested. She also manages to keep you guessing as to who the respective culprits are, which when you're as used to the genre as I am, is quite a trick.
The problem is that the characterisation, with the exception of Jackson Brodie, is trite and the dialogue completely awful. There are two middle-aged women - Amelia and Julia whose sister Olivia disappeared 35 years earlier and was never found. They come across like something from a particularly low-brow Jilly Copper, Julia in particular reading like someone you would just want to smack in the face with a frozen turkey if you ever had the misfortune of bumping into her in Iceland. Theo is the token nice fat bloke who eats because he's miserable and whose daughter Laura was murdered in his solicitor's office over a decade before, the murderer never being found. Finally there's Caroline, a teacher in a middle England countryside school married to a stereotypical upper class landlowner Jonathan (another refugee from a Jilly Cooper novel) who hides a gruesome past.
Jackson Brodie is at least more believable, although you never get to hear his own troubled history until the end of the book and even then, it feels like an afterthought. However, Atkinson is a devotee of the tell rather than show method and we are handheld through everything that he and the other characters think - she even goes so far as to add thoughts in brackets at the end of a sentence just in case we don't understand what she's getting at.
There are also several scenes where she strains credibility - for example in addition to saddling Jackson with a broken marriage, she throws in a scene where his bitchy ex-wife announces that she's taking their daughter to New Zealand because her new husband is getting a job there, only to later decide that this will only be for a year because the position is temporary. It was a soap opera move and not something you'd expect to see in a "literary detective story".
Great writing but... June 1, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is the first book I have read by Kate Atkinson and I have to say I've been left a little disappointed.
As a `mystery' I found the pace to be a little slow, there wasn't much drama between the characters for suspense and I didn't really care about the outcome for any of them.
Atkinson's writing is very good and wonderfully descriptive, but I found myself skipping a lot of this deeper writing in order to continue with the story, to keep the pace going inside my own head.
The pace does finally pick up towards the end but then the book finishes and I'm left holding it in my hands and thinking `then what?' The loose ends are not really tied up. Only one case is solved, the reader finds out what has happened in the other cases but this isn't explained to the characters thereby creating no dramatic finale. It would have been interesting to see what their reactions might have been.
I enjoyed the book and would read more of Atkinson's work; I just feel this was marketed as a mystery when really it was something else.
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