GREAT LINES:
She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.”.
Jackson Brodie, a tender-hearted, run-down Cambridge private detective, investigates three separate cold cases: a missing child, a slain teen, and an axe murder. The detective story framework allows the author to playfully scatter clues while giving us vivid psychological portraits of the families affected by the crimes, all the while turning our assumptions on their heads. Atkinson’s humor and style make this a new take on an old genre.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Case Histories
OPENING LINE:
They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angled in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enought to see that it wasn’t birds — it was paper.
.
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Brian Remy wakes to find himself lying in a pool of his own blood, from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Frighteningly, he has no memory of the incident, and this is just the first of many memory gaps for Remy. It’s only days after September 11, and Remy is a cop who was at the site that day who gives tours of The Zero to visiting politicians and celebrities. As we lurch forward with Remy through increasingly disorienting memory lapses, we discover that he has a new job with a unnamed government agency, trying to uncover a terrorist cell. Each new lucid surfacing is like joining a movie midway through, and Remy starts to fear what he may be doing during his blacked-out gaps. Walter infuses his feverish story with equal parts black humor and paranoia, and brilliantly skewers our post 9/11 war on terror.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Zero