Book Review: Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson – more fun and games with the latest Jackson Brodie mystery

I have to admit to being a Jackson Brodie fan since we met the beleaguered private investigator in the first book, Case Histories. I’ve read them more than once as well as enjoying immensely the TV adaptations starring Jason Isaacs. So here we are, five years since the last one (Big Sky), with another in the series – something I wasn’t really expecting, and you can imagine my delight.

Atkinson has a habit of not really continuing where she left off in the last book. Instead we seem to catch up with Jackson some years later, or with a completely different set of circumstances. Sometimes he’s flush and others he’s down on his luck. In Death at the Sign the Rook, Jackson is living with his girlfriend, Tatiana, and has had enough income from his PI work to buy himself a lovely big Land Rover Defender. His new case involves the theft of what looks like a Renaissance painting – a portrait of a Woman with a Weasel, which until recently hung on the bedroom wall, out of reach of prying eyes, of an elderly lady who has recently died.

It seems Dorothy Padgett’s carer Melanie Hope has taken it, and just disappeared without notice, leaving only an old mystery novel: Hark! Hark! The Dogs Do Bark by Nancy Styles. Dorothy’s daughter Hazel and her son Ian want Jackson to track Melanie down rather than calling the police – the painting may have some dodgy provenance. We get Jackson’s usual internal sizing up of the situation with Dorothy’s grasping offspring, squabbling over their mother’s possessions.

Hazel was right, there was nothing to see out in the garden. The whole place was in hibernation, waiting to spring back into life in a few months. Dorothy wouldn’t be here to appreciate it. No springing back to life for Dorothy Padgett.
The end of the garden was less manicured, there was a compost heap and a garden incinerator. For leaves, Jackson supposed. He looked inside. Something had been reduced to ash in there. What had been burned? And by whom? He poked around with a twig that he found lying on the lawn. There were a few scraps of paper on which some handwriting was visible. Sir Edmund removed his armoured gauntlets and pulled Marjorie to his breast and said, “You little fool.” And “Where is my theatre nurse? I cannot operate without her. And so on. Dorothy’s romantic stories, presumably. Who had burned them? Melanie Hope? And why?
A big fat clue would have been nice. A bit of charred paper saying, And the murderer is ... But Dorothy Padgett wasn’t murdered. Why was he thinking that?

The story weaves in and out of Jackson’s investigation, bringing in several other main characters, beginning with Lady Milton over at her cash-strapped stately home, Burton Makepeace. LM has similarly lost a valuable painting, this one a Turner, at the same time as her companionable housekeeper Sophie disappeared. She is struggling to keep control of things while her eldest son Piers is trying to turn the big house into a hotel complete with staged murder mystery evenings. She’s an impossible character to like with her old-world thinking and arrant snobbery, but you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for her.

There’s also the boring vicar, Simon Cate, who has had a complete loss of faith, but battles on regardless, a fondness for animals, his only saving grace. And then there’s Ben, ex-military and a bit sorry for himself having lost a leg on his last tour, while missing his mates in the Army. He’s living with his sister, and learning to look after bees. We also meet Reggie Chase again – you’ll remember her from previous books – now a Yorkshire police detective.

These threads all slowly weave the characters into a plot involving a blizzard, a murderer on the run who’s armed and dangerous, and a murder mystery evening at Burton Makepeace. Somehow all of the characters end up there – we’re given a hint of what’s to come in a kind of prologue – and Jackson’s going to feel glad he bought the Defender. As usual it isn’t always the crooks that are the baddies, or not all of them anyway, and Jackson may or may not err on the wrong side of the law.

Atkinson is a master of creating a tantalising story with plenty of humour and surprise twists. However, I did feel this story took a while to get going. We get stuck for chunks of narrative with Simon the vicar, and Lady Milton, both of whom can be a bit tiresome. But once the story gets going, there’s plenty to enjoy and the ending’s a cracker. Not the best Jackson Brodie, but still worth reading. A three-and-a-half star read from me.