Death at the Sign of the Rock
Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £22)
The sixth of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, Death at the Sign of the Rock can trace its origins back many years to when the author first toyed with the idea of writing an Agatha Christie tribute. Though whether that grand old dame of letters would have approved of the drunken, armed shenanigans that break out over a chaotic Murder Mystery Weekend is another matter.
Private detective Jackson Brodie (played by Jason Isaacs in the BBC adaptation, Case Histories) has been hired by twin siblings Hazel and Ian Padgett to investigate the disappearance of an old painting following their mother’s death. It used to hang opposite her bed, but now it’s gone and the Padgetts suspect the old lady’s carer, Melanie, of running off with it. Brodie doesn’t trust them an inch. Their answers sound too rehearsed. But he wants to track down Melanie, if only to clear her name.
At the stately home of Burton Makepeace, Brodie’s police friend, DC Reggie Chase, is dealing with another art theft, which has upset the aristocratic Milton family, including the formidable dowager Lady Milton, who seems never to have got the memo about joining the 20th century, let alone the 21st. The family’s cashflow problems have forced them to sell numerous precious paintings over the years, and to turn part of their vast house into a hotel. Now a Turner canvas has vanished. Is it a genuine theft, or is one of the Miltons running an insurance scam under the noses of the others?
There are similarities in both cases. A young woman has appeared, befriended the family, worked for them and then disappeared at the same time as a valuable painting. Brodie has to consider whether three suspects could all be the same person, a serial art thief using the same MO around the country.
We know early on that the action is going to come to a head at a Murder Mystery Weekend in Burton Makepeace. Atkinson’s job is to make sure everyone gets there. Brodie researches art crime for the first time in his life, and tries to persuade Reggie Chase, against her better judgement, that it would be worth her while to join him on his latest quest.
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For much of the book, though, Brodie and Chase are working away quietly in the background, ceding the spotlight to characters like Simon Cate, a rural vicar with a dwindling congregation who was never much of a believer in the first place. Cate was recently struck dumb while trying to say the word “Amen” and hasn’t been able to speak since. Also helping to move the plot along is Ben Jennings, who lost a leg to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and suffers from depression and PTSD, but don’t try telling his stoical, no-nonsense family that.
Their paths will take them all to a stately home on a fateful winter’s night to collide with a dysfunctional aristocratic family, a group of strolling players led by a booming old thesp and an escaped prisoner who is armed and dangerous.
But the ending doesn’t quite deliver – as though, having put all the pieces in place to finish the story with a knockabout farce, Atkinson changed her mind and scaled it down instead, despite the potential for the assembled group to create far more chaos and confusion.
A more dynamic denouement might have offset the impression that Brodie and Chase seem disengaged from the action throughout. It’s enjoyable, but unlikely to stand out as one of the best of the Brodie series.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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