Deadlier than the male

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, £17.99) is a case in point. It is the third of Kate Atkinson’s novels about Jackson Brodie, a former policeman who is crime-prone in the way that other people are accident-prone. Here he is involved in a train crash in Edinburgh, which brings him again to the notice of Louise Monroe, a hard-bitten Scottish CID officer. They are attracted to each other, but unfortunately both of them have acquired perfect spouses since they last met. Atkinson’s narrative slips fluidly between characters and time-frames (at one point moving with characteristic insouciance into uncharted territory beyond death). As usual, she hooks together several plot lines with the surreal assurance of Heath Robinson’s assembling a machine.

A murderer has just been released after 30-odd years in jail. An Edinburgh GP is married to a businessman who is edging perilously close to criminal company. Their baby’s nanny is trying to educate herself on the quiet with the help of a terminally ill born-again Christian, while keeping a safe distance from her only living relative, a brother who is appropriating her Loeb classics in translation and putting them to a use for which they were not designed. Most characters are extraordinarily well-read and have a fund of apt quotations at their disposal. ‘A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen,’ Jackson remarks at one point in this thought- provoking, infuriating and very funny novel.