when will there be good news by kate atkinson

When the train crashes near the house where Reggie happens to be watching TV, she gives him CPR. Rattled after visiting a child he suspects he fathered despite the mother’s denials, Jackson mistakenly takes the train to Edinburgh instead of London. Jackson’s connection to the others is revealed gradually: Jackson and Louise were once almost lovers although they since married others as a youth Jackson joined the search party that found Joanna hiding in a field following the murders. Louise chooses not to mention her other reason for visiting, a suspicion that Joanna’s husband torched one of his failing businesses for the insurance.

Actually Louise has come to warn Joanna that her family’s murderer is being released from prison. When prickly, self-loathing policewoman Louise Monroe comes to call on lovely, warm-hearted Joanna, watchful Reggie (think Ellen Page from Juno with a Scottish brogue) is struck by the similarities between the two well-dressed professional women. To Reggie, whose own mother recently died in a freak accident, Joanna and her baby represent an ideal family (Joanna’s husband, a struggling businessman, seems only a vaguely irritating irrelevance to fatherless Reggie). Thirty years later, Joanna, now a doctor in Edinburgh, has become a mother herself.

In the emotional opening, six-year-old Joanna witnesses the brutal killing of her mother and siblings by a knife-wielding madman in the British countryside. A third appearance for former police investigator and private detective Jackson Brodie in this psychologically astute thriller from Atkinson ( One Good Turn, 2006, etc.).

When will there be good news by kate atkinson