Jackson Brodie is trying to get on with his life. He suspects that his ex-girlfriend’s baby is his and sets out to find a lock of the child’s hair while his new wife is away in the States. Joanna, a thirty-six-year-old married doctor with a baby, has to come to terms with a terrible event that happened when she was six: the brutal murder of her mother, sister, brother and dog. Joanna’s housekeeper, Reggie, is an intelligent but lost young girl who has recently been orphaned. There is also Joanna’s husband, who gets involved in criminal cases, inspector Louise Monroe, a friend of Jackson’s, who is looking into the case, and Decker, the man who murdered Joanna’s family, who has just been released from prison. I’ll skip over the other protagonists in the other parallel stories. Jackson is in a train accident and is rescued by Reggie, who asks him to help find Joanna and the baby who have disappeared, while Louise also takes on the case. In the end, Joanna and the baby are saved, her husband is jailed, Reggie goes to live with her, Louise never admits to Jackson that she loves him, and Jackson returns home to find Decker hanging in his living room and his wife missing with all his money. We learn at the end that Jackson is the man who rescued Joanna thirty years earlier. These seemingly unrelated stories are confusing at first, but it all comes together in the end. I love the plot and the humorous tone.
“Fine”, she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from “I’m dying in anguish” to “I’m experiencing euphoric joy.” “Fine”, she said. “I’m fine.”
Listened to as an audiobook