Strangely, this book is not stocked at powells.com, so I am without an image for now...but perhaps that is representative of how I felt about the book overall. It has a great cover and paperback feel and the jacket cover description is enticing - but in the end, I was underwhelmed and disappointed. The book starts out with three differnt crimes - a young beloved child who disappears into the night, a teenage mother stretched to her limits who wacks her husband with an axe, and a young woman gunned down in her father's law office as the result of a seeming act of violence. Private detective Jackson Brodie is contacted by family members related to the three incidents, asking for his help in one way or another. Plot-wise, this started out promising for me, but I found Atkinson simply writing little vignettes about her characters rather than a cohesive narrative and often throwing in salacious material that did not seem necessary to the plot. The lives of the characters are tragic, with each one living in their own level of dispair. By the end, the reality of each crime is revealed - but it is mostly just told to the reader in a way that made me wonder why I had to read the whole book to get there. Clearly, the point of the book is not whodunnit, but rather the impact that violence and loss has on survivors. This book was unable to hold my attention, despite my initial interest in the story. Atkinson has a second novel that follows up on her characters from this one. I know I am a sucker for the sequel - in many many cases where I did not even enjoy the first one - but alas, I will probably check out One Good Turn from the library at some point in the near future. Why? I simply cannot explain it.
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