Nom de Plume

The folks over at the Lit Blog Co-op had nominated Atkinson’s Case Histories as a Read This! novel a few months ago. It’s strange, because I probably would have gotten around to it on my own; I loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum (though I found Human Croquet hard to get into and Emotionally Weird just plain incomprehensible). But there’s something about feeling you have to do something ; it just sucks your motivation away. And thus I checked this out library a total of three times before actually reading it.

The novel is about three different past crimes. In the first, the youngest daughter in a family disappears one night. In the second, a college-aged girl is killed while working as a summer intern in her father’s law office. The third is about the sister of a convicted axe murderer who is seeking her sibling’s daughter. The cases are hinged together by the private detective put on each of these cases years and years later; he has his own tragedies and past mystery. And the resolution of each of the cases is shocking in its own way.

It was an ambitious novel, and I have to be honest and say that I’m not really sure what I thought of it. Sometimes it dragged. The first bit about the sister disappearing was a chore to wade through, for instance. Other times it sprawled, with its jumping around from character to character. But I read this a few weeks ago, and ultimately think it’s one of those novels that you appreciate more in retrospect.