Kate Atkinson is a Whitebread award winner who decided to branch into suspense fiction with Case Histories. Although I normally like to start a series at the beginning, I jumped into When Will There be Good News because I happened to hear good things about it and amazon had a 99 cent sale on it. It then sat on my kindle for such a long time that by the time I got round to it, I had totally forgotten everything about it, so I started reading with a totally blank slate, which was an interesting experience.
Somehow I forgot about the suspense part, but remembered she was a Whitbread winner. The novel starts out on a high pitch, with a brutal slaying, but then immediately moves to thirty years later and much lower tempo, so for a long while I thought it was actually not a suspense novel at all. Atkinson raises the tempo at a steady rate through the book, until she reaches a high point about 4/5 of the way in.
I think I preferred the first half of the novel over the second half. Atkinson has a good eye for character interactions, as well as a nice turn of phrase. Once she gets into the heavy suspense part, she also gets into heavy coincidence territory, and the climax really pushed into unbelievable territory for me. I think I'd enjoy her literary work, and am looking to read more by her.
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