"When Will There Be Good News?" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book.

30 years after her novelist father left and the rest of her family were savagely killed, Joanna is a married doctor in Edinburgh with a 1 y.o. child. Reggie Chase (a clever 16 y.o. girl, who lives alone) helps with childcare. She lies about her mother being alive (she died on holiday with her new lover). Her brother Billie, 19, misbehaves. She's tutored by the dying Miss McDonald.

Jackson Brodie (ex-army, rich from an inheritance) gets a hair from Nathan, 2 y.o. who's at nursery school in Yorkshire. His ex-wife is Josie. Their 12 y.o. daughter is Marly. His ex-girlfriend is Julia, who claims that Nathan isn't his.

Louise (40 - a chief inspector with son Archie, 16. She used to work with Jackson) has re-married Patrick (surgeon, with a Ph.D son). An amusement arcade owned by Joanna's husband has burnt down - not the first of his places that has burnt down. Louise investigates, discovering that Neil's struggling financially. She has to visit Joanna anyway, to tell her that the killer, Decker, is about to be released. She cares about Alison Needler too, whose husband went crazy and has gone missing.

Neil says that Joanna's gone to stay with an aunt in Yorkshire until the press stories about the killer's release calm down. Brodie misses her - she was her confidante. She's suspicious - Joanna's car and phone haven't gone, and the baby's comforter (bloodied) is found by the dog.

A train crash is caused by Miss McDonald's driving. She dies. Reggie saves the life of Brodie, who was in the train. When Brodie wakes in hospital, he has the ID of Andrew Decker. Later he recalls who he is.

2 men wreck Reggie's flat, saying they're looking for a guy called Reggie Chase. She reports her suspicions about Joanna to Louise, and tells her the name of the man whose life she saved. Reggie visits him, and helps him out of hospital by claiming she's his daughter. He wants to get back to London to meet his wife Tessa (a museum curator; they've known each other for 4 months) at the airport. He has an accident in a rented car with Reggie. Louise picks them up. Meeting Jackson again has made her have doubts about her marriage. She's investigated Joanna's aunt - she's been dead a fortnight. Joanna had recently met Decker in prison.

Reggie enlists Jackson to track down Joanna. She's being held hostage by people who Neil owes money to. She kills her imprisoners. Reggie and Jackson give her and the baby a lift home. The police track down Decker who shoots a colleague of Louise then kills himself. Nobody finds out who killed the kipnappers. Tessa turns out to be a fake who's gone off with Jackson's money. Louises is about to leave her husband.

The main characters engage in entertaining internal monologue, dropping literary allusions and asking themselves questions. They have an interest in language and figures of speech. There are many observations and fun phrases -

• "who looked as if she'd knitted herself"
• "dressed in a uniform that would have allowed her to drown in a vat of Heinz tomato soup without anyone noticing""

Other reviews

• Patrick Ness (Atkinson began tackling life and death and fate and love with a freedom and fluency unseen in her earlier novels. By becoming a crime writer, she has - in a way that other "literary" types may wish to note - become a better literary writer than ever: funny, bracingly intelligent and delightfully prickly. ... Lovers of the crime genre have given Atkinson a hard time for her use of coincidence, and truth be told, the first half of When Will There Be Good News? can be a little hard to swallow ... By putting coincidence so firmly in control of her plot - all the way through to its very last page, where two protagonists are revealed to have an even deeper connection - she starts to raise larger questions of destiny and fate)