Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £18.99) (From The Northern Echo)

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £18.99)

10:12am Saturday 4th September 2010 in

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MUCH like Ian Rankin’s central character Inspector Rebus, Jackson Brodie in Kate Atkinson’s latest work of fiction is a quasi-intellectual rebel with a dark past. But unlike Rebus, Brodie is a rebel without a real cause – an ex-detective floating from one case to another.

He spends this outing searching for a client’s lost identity – unwittingly bumbling on to various tangled tales of fraud, kidnapping and corruption. However, this is no paint-by-numbers crime thriller, but a more complex animal altogether.

Setting her story in Seventies Leeds and the present day, Atkinson – who comes from York – uses the crime format to examine moral ambiguities of Britain’s recent past.

From the Yorkshire Ripper case to New Labour’s failings and police corruption, very little escapes her keen eye. Fans and new readers alike will enjoy a plot that is as intelligent as it is gripping.

Sarah Warwick