When Will There Be Good News? [Hardcover]

Starred Review. In Atkinson's stellar third novel to feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie (after One Good Turn), unrelated characters and plot lines collide with momentous results. On a country road, six-year-old Joanna Mason is the only survivor of a knife attack that leaves her mother and two siblings dead. Thirty years later, after boarding the wrong train in Yorkshire, Brodie is almost killed when the train crashes. He's saved by 16-year-old Regina Reggie Chase, the nanny of Dr. Joanna Hunter, née Mason. In the chaos following the crash, Brodie ends up with the wallet of Andrew Decker, the recently released man convicted of murdering the Mason family. Enter DCI Louise Monroe, Brodie's former love interest, who's tracking Decker because of a recent case involving a similar family and crime. When Dr. Hunter disappears, Reggie is convinced she's been kidnapped and enlists the reluctant Brodie to track her down. A lesser author would buckle under so many story lines, but Atkinson juggles them brilliantly, simultaneously tying up loose ends from Turn and opening new doors for further Brodie misadventures. (Sept.)
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“In Atkinson’s stellar third novel to feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie (after One Good Turn), unrelated characters and plot lines collide with momentous results… A lesser author would buckle under so many story lines, but Atkinson juggles them brilliantly, simultaneously tying up loose ends from Turn and opening new doors for further Brodie misadventures.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“READER, SUSPEND DISBELIEF. Find something high-flown, and attach with care, then send your critical faculties hurtling. Kate Atkinson’s latest (darkest? bloodiest? most free-wheeling?) slice of make-belief has attitude and altitude in abundance. It pushes its luck in taking coincidence and outlandishness to levels of sheer unadulterated chutzpah, and by its stomach-curdling ending, it’s so accelerated that you’re waiting for the wheels to come off. They don’t.”
—The Scotsman

“It doesn’t really matter in which genre Atkinson chooses to write. Her subject is always the irrecoverable loss of love and how best to continue living once you have glumly recognised that that was what the world was like, things improved but they didn’t get better. Her gift is presenting this unnerving and subversive philosophy as a dazzling form of entertainment.”
—The Sunday Times

“Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes.”
—Harlan Coben

“Atkinson has turned the corner from writing wonderfully rich literary novels with mysteries at their core to writing mysteries with rich literary style.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Atkinson’s novel is like something her detective might drink in the wee hours after knocking around the docks, something straight up with a twist.”
—The Globe and Mail

“The most fun I’ve had with a novel this year.”
—Ian Rankin

“Clever, wry and highly readable. . . . Almost every coincidence is delicious and not a little comic.”
—Toronto Star

“An absolute joy to read.”
—The Guardian (UK)

“A remarkable feat of storytelling bravado.”
—Washington Post

“An engrossing, enjoyable, complex novel packed with intriguing characters, vividly imagined scenes and a compelling plot.”
—Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Compelling from the start”
—Vogue

“Atkinson unravels the plot with dexterity and insightful aplomb”
—Easy Living

“Atkinson’s writing is charming, and her style and wit always a delight”
—Literary Review

“...a brilliantly observed drama on the nature of fate, love and memory”
—Marie Claire

“The opening chapter of Kate Atkinson’s latest book is one of the finest pieces of suspense literature you will read this year”
—The London Lite

“Superb writing and accomplished plots”
—Glamour

“Unconventional and thrilling crime fiction at its best”
—The List

“An exhilarating jigsaw of a novel”
—Woman and Home

“…she stitches the seeming discordant plots into one big harmonious patchwork, where every stitch is a careful stitch and every patch operates both on its own merits and as part of the whole”
—Scotland on Sunday

“…it’s the kind of wonderful novel that simultaneously grips and transports you”
—Sainsbury’s Magazine

“The novel grips, excites, moves, amuses and will have you racing through the pages”
—Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

“This is a perceptive glimpse into the legacy of the real victims – those left behind when their loved ones are taken from them”
—Psychologies

“The third, the best, and hopefully not the last Atkinson novel featuring private eye Jackson Brodie.”
— Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

“Brilliant…. Atkinson’s detective novels are masterworks of character-driven plots and leisurely observation. But they are primarily triumphs … of tone: sardonic, faithless, and dark as the inside of a cow. As a reader, you might come for the mystery, but you’ll return for the prose.”
— Andrew Pyper, The Globe and Mail

“Deliciously underhanded…. It is very much to be hoped that she keeps this gratifying series going.”
— The New York Times