Death At The Sign Of The Rook by Kate Atkinson

Death At The Sign Of The Rook by Kate Atkinson

320 pages

Published September 2024 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Welcome to Rook Hall. The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.

In his sleepy Yorkshire town, ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off boredom and malaise. His only case is the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But Jackson soon uncovers a string of unsolved art thefts that lead him down a dizzying spiral of disguise and deceit to Burton Makepeace, a formerly magnificent estate now partially converted into a hotel hosting Murder Mystery weekends.

As paying guests, impecunious aristocrats and old friends collide, we are treated to Atkinson’s most charming and fiendishly clever mystery yet, one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to the modern era of Knives Out and Only Murders in the Building.

My Thoughts: 

I felt certain, when I began thinking about writing this review, that I first read a Kate Atkinson book when I read Life After Life. That book was one of my favorite books of 2015; it's a book I still think about and one that has kept me returning to Atkinson. In point of fact, though, my first Atkinson book was When Will There Be Good News (which I'd clearly forgotten by this year). That book is actually the third of the Jackson Brody books. 

In 2020, I finally read Cases Histories, the first of the Jackson Brodie books. I had every intention of returning to the Brodie books, but it wasn't until this year that I listened to the second book, One Good Turn, and When Will There Be Good News (again!). I'd hoped to listen to the next two books but it turns out my library doesn't have them on audio. Which is how I went from the third book to this, the sixth. 

Do you have to read them in order? No necessarily. But would it be a good idea to do so? Yes, definitely. When I last encountered Reggie she was a 16-year-old who got caught up in a kidnapping case and ended up helping Jackson; now she is a detective, who is very fed up with Jackson's questionable methods. In this book, Jackson's daughter is now grown up with a child of her own. How did they all get to where they are now? 

Unfortunately, that wasn't the only problem I had with this book. I've grown used to Atkinson filling her books with large casts of characters, with her books hopping away from Jackson's story to delve into other characters' stories. For some reason, in this book, I was really distracted by this and grew a little bored when we got into side stories of two of the characters. To be fair, those characters did play into the story when things really picked up later in the book, but I'm still not entirely sure that we needed to know their full back story to understand their actions in the moment. I don't know if it makes me feel better to know that I'm not alone in feeling this way. 

BUT...I really liked the storyline - the mystery of who stole a small painting, how it came to be in the owner's possession to begin with, how it ties into another art theft. I liked the parts of the book where Jackson was involved, especially his interactions with Reggie. I liked the way things played out once everything began to pick up again. Even a less than her best Atkinson book is still worth reading. And I will read book seven in the series whenever that is released. But first, I'm going back to books four and five. Because I have to know how we got to this point!