Decades from now, will the anguish of Hope McMaster, the woman Jackson is tracing - the woman with “the black hole at the beginning of her life” - repeat itself for Courtney? Is Tracy trying to save a mistreated little girl or herself?Ītkinson’s characters tend to have bleak pasts, which she mines most expertly, if sometimes to the point of distraction. But Courtney’s true identity is hazy, and as some 35-year-old questions begin to be answered troubling parallels emerge. She tells herself she’s rescuing Courtney, and perhaps she is. Good-hearted Tracy: over 50, overweight and in over her head. One fallen fledgling popped back into the nest.” She would make up for all the other lost kids. She’s hiding out with her new acquisition, a little girl named Courtney, making plans to change their identities and take flight as “Imogen Brown and her little girl, Lucy.” She imagines “walking hand in hand with the kid into a clean, untarnished, white future. Jackson can’t find Tracy because she’s trying not to be found. Precisely where she is and what she’s doing is another of the book’s many mysteries. But she isn’t at home, and Jackson isn’t the only person looking for her. Hard-won clues soon lead Jackson to the door of Tracy Waterhouse, one of those two unlucky West Yorkshire officers whose 1975 flashback opened the book. (He’s also hoping to find his second ex-wife, the one who “had taken him for the longest of cons - seduced, courted, married and robbed him blind.”) Jackson is “off the grid” now, semiretired, picking up jobs that mostly involve looking for people, though “not necessarily finding them.” His current assignment is to trace the biological parents of a woman named Hope McMaster, adopted back in the 1970s when she was 2 by a British couple who promptly moved their little family to New Zealand. The Brodie novels are twisting, turning, tangled narratives that leap from decade to decade, character to character, with the secrets playing second fiddle to Atkinson’s sad and funny studies in human nature.Īge 45 when we first met him in 2004 in “Case Histories,” Jackson is now 50, and, in four books covering five years, he has been through several lifetimes’ worth of ordeals (winning and losing a fortune, marrying a grifter, barely surviving a train crash, to mention just a few). “Started Early, Took My Dog” is the fourth book in a series noted for its unorthodoxy. Slain women have become a staple of Kate Atkinson’s crime novels, which also feature the gruff yet protective ex-cop, ex-P.I., ex-husband and father of two, Jackson Brodie.
The worst of it is there’s a child locked in with her, “filthy, nothing but skin and bone,” looking “like a famine victim.” Behind a locked door in a block of flats lies the decomposing body of a woman.
It’s West Yorkshire not long before the Yorkshire Ripper starts his killing spree, and two police officers make a grisly discovery.
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