Case Histories

After finishing the last book in the Flavia De Luce series, I went to my book shelves to find a real book to read.  Lately I've been stuck on ebooks, and I have so many hard copies that I've not read yet.  It was time to turn some real pages.

Among the many books I have on my shelves, I have the first three books in a series by Kate Atkinson.  I've never read anything by Atkinson, so I pulled out the first in the series, Case Histories, and started it.

You can see that Stephan King called it "the best mystery of the decade." High praise and I think the book is delivering on a pleasurable and interesting reading adventure.

 Atkinson takes a good 100 pages telling 4 seemingly unconnected stories.  One is about a missing 3 year old, a story of a woman who loses it and murders her husband, the story of a man whose daughter is murdered by a man who has never been caught, and the story about the private detective who seems to be bringing all the stories together.

Atkinson has a great voice and I like the flow of her writing.  For a mystery writer, she is skilled in crafting prose that does more than tell the story with the appropriate clues and foreshadowing and is pleasurable to read.  It evokes the feelings that go with the story, so we are not only on the journey to solve the mystery but we get to know the characters in an emotional way.

If this book is good measure of Kate Atkinson's other books, I will continue to read her other books.  Next up: