His implication wasn’t hard to parse: This 40-something single mother, the product of a Scottish public university with several odd jobs on her résumé (hotel chambermaid, legal secretary), could not possibly have bested the likes of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis deliberately, but only via some accidental whimsy - as if she were a talking dog, or a chicken trained to play tick-tack-toe. But in the end this is a clever detective novel, no less but no more.There’s an old story about the time Kate Atkinson took home her first major literary award, then known as the Whitbread Prize and now called the Costa, for her bravura 1995 debut, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.” Even in the midst of bestowing it, the committee’s chairman, an august academic named Richard Hoggart, felt compelled to say that Atkinson had written a postmodern novel, though he doubted whether she knew it. Unfortunately the two never balanced.” Some of the other characters are more fully turned out, and the multipronged plot is ingeniously tied up. Three unrelated murder cases come under the scrutiny of private investigator Jackson Brodie, a man whose quirks are only slightly less predictable than his canniest pensées: “The entire world consisted of one accounting sheet-lost on the left-hand side, found on the right. Here in Case Histories, it’s the detective novel, and it gets the better of her (not by much, but still). In her last book, Not the End of the World, her plaything was magic realism. She seems to have taken the vote of confidence as encouragement to experiment. Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, beat out Salman Rushdie for the 1995 Whitbread Award, an endorsement of her sure hand in depicting the peculiar cast of life in her native Yorkshire.

Kate atkinson case histories review