Big Sky’ by Kate Atkinson   (2019) – 400 pages

There is nothing really wrong with ‘Big Sky’. It is an entertainment with a lot of English cute along the way. But the novel is so busy showing the idiosyncrasies of its large cast of quirky characters that it has no time for any real depth. You almost need a scorecard to keep track of all the folks running around.

This time detective Jackson Brodie has moved to the northeastern coast of England and while watching for a possible wayward husband is reluctantly on the trail of a sex trafficking ring which supplies young girls from other countries for some of Britain’s elites. The sex trafficking ring is made up of three small-time criminals who conveniently are not involved in any of the actual sexual abuse so that they and their family members can also be portrayed as cute. Since the sexual abuse is never portrayed, ‘Big Sky’ can keep its characteristic light sense of humor. Instead of sex abuse we get loads of physical violence.

Along the way of this very tangled plot there are some humorous lines:

“You would have thought that getting divorced from a woman would free you from the obligation of identifying her corpse, but apparently not.”

Since Jackson Brodie is a recurring character in a series of novels, we find references to other extraneous events here. Also there are more recurring characters including Brodie’s family and the two female policewomen Ronnie and Reggie. The subplots concerning Jackson’s family are probably of great interest to Jackson Brodie fans but not so much to the rest of us readers.

‘Big Sky’ is a whirlwind of English persons and plot lines. ‘Big Sky’ is so busy with its multitude of eccentric characters to have any profundity. It is all on the surface. Atkinson would have to slow down, simplify her story, and drastically reduce the number of characters in order to achieve any real depth. This is a crowd pleaser which is not a bad thing, but that’s all it is.

I still very much admire Kate Atkinson’s more literary novels such as ‘Life After Life’ and ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’. However Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels do not have the depth of for instance Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache detective series, so from now on I will probably stick with Atkinson’s more literary novels and avoid her detective novels.

Grade:   B