Unclosed cases

He wants to destroy the criminal cold cases. And someone is trying to destroy him with dynamite. In the summer of 1970, someone kidnapped a reclusive mathematician's three-year-old daughter from his garden, and the child vanished without a trace. Similarly, the madman who, in September 1994, brutally dispatched the barely adult daughter of one of the co-owners of a law firm in front of the employees, has still not been found. Not to mention the further insidious intentions of a released female prisoner who, in a fit of madness in 1979, ended her husband's life with an axe. All three mysteries have remained notorious "monuments" in the criminal annals of the city of Cambridge, but morally they must never be statute-barred. Fortunately, among the renegades from the local police force, there is a Scottish investigator who is not in the least bit daunted by the fact that over three and a half decades have passed since the first crime. As a private eye, he has his own opinions about the supposed dovish nature of the English, and he doesn't just see these challenges as a diversion from the routine tracking of unfaithful spouses. Detective Jackson Brodie may occasionally succumb to a nicotine addiction or a buxom beauty, much like the foot soldiers of the hardboiled American school, but his psychological profile is more nuanced. He knows how miserably the victims' relatives still feel after so many years – he too was marked by a fatal blow in his childhood that never healed. The melancholy of the 45-year-old, suffering from a divorce, custody battles over his daughter, and constant toothache, is eased only by his love for French culture and for somewhat happy endings. He is, after all, particularly set against those who harm defenceless girls. Will he piece together the clues in this tangled mess before his adversary tampers with his car's brakes and surrounds his dilapidated house with dynamite? And is that his only enemy? The first Gordian knot for Jackson Brodie – the protagonist of the crime series Case Histories, adapted by the BBC. Kate Atkinson has equipped him with the gift of pulling skeletons out of cupboards and deceiving appearances, because the island's psychopaths are seriously to die for. “A magnificent return to the temple of form is enhanced by meticulously described emotions and believable characters. The awareness that we are reading an undiluted tragicomedy about our times is crowned by the author's intransigence: she grabs reality by the scruff of the neck and doesn't compromise.” – The Daily Telegraph “Atkinson has sensed that the most essential thing for a good crime novel is not to answer the question of who the perpetrator is, but to find a way to live with the crime.” – The Washington Post “A novelistic canvas about the power of grief, cruelty, and loss, but first-rate. And completely unclassifiable.” – Chicago Sun-Times “More than on the investigation, the author focuses on relationships and how family influences us from childhood. (...) It's all too easy to become a murderer, a victim, or an accomplice.” – from reader reviews on databazeknih.cz He added her to the sad tally he was carrying in his head these days. If she were alive, Tanya Fletcher would now be twenty-five, Olivia Land would be thirty-seven, Laura Wyre would be twenty-eight, and Kerry-Anne Brockley would be twenty-six. (...) What could he do? He could hardly refuse the poor man, that bloated balloon puffing on his inhaler, who had nothing left but a memory – the idea of the shape of the space where a twenty-eight-year-old woman should be. Theo had a dead body, Amelie and Julia were missing a dead body. Olivia represented a completely different space from Laura; she was an intangible mystery, a question without an answer. A puzzle you could rack your brains over to the point of madness. They would never find Olivia, never find out what happened to her, he was sure of that – and it would just be a matter of finding the right opportunity to tell them. He probably wouldn't even be able to ask them for any money. “Excuse me, your sister is dead and gone forever, and I get five hundred pounds for services rendered?” – excerpt from the text