Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson: A review

When I read that Kate Atkinson had released another book featuring former police detective and now private detective Jackson Brodie, I put my reading list aside and picked it up. I never miss a chance to spend time in the company of Brodie.

This entry is, it seems to me, an homage to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None which I read long, long ago and which, along with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd engendered and confirmed my love of mysteries. 

Atkinson takes us to Rook Hall, the east wing of one of England's stately homes called Burton Makepeace where a "Murder Mystery Weekend" is being hosted by the cash-strapped owners of the home as a way of raising money. For only £1250 per person, the guests which include a vicar who has lost his faith and his ability to speak, an army major who lost a leg and his interest in life, a countess, and the Dowager Lady Milton as hostess will have the opportunity to solve a murder mystery. 

But then a real mystery intervenes when a convicted murderer on the run is thought to be hiding somewhere in Burton Makepeace's surrounding moors.

To further complicate matters, Jackson Brodie shows up along with DC Reggie Chase. They are there because of the theft of some paintings including a rather valuable one by J.M.W. Turner. The suspect is the housekeeper, Sophie, who has now gone missing. 

Moreover, there was another recent art theft from the home of a recently deceased widow, a Renaissance painting titled "The Woman with the Weasel." The suspect there was the widow's caregiver named Melanie. Are Melanie and Sophie actually the same person?

So all the plot elements are set for a typical Christie-like mystery, but wait! There's more! There's humor and quite a lot of it, actually. Much of the humor comes from Brodie's internal dialogs and philosophical musings with himself.

The plot was fairly intricate and engaged the little gray cells (as Poirot would say) in trying to sort it out. The result was a highly entertaining read that made me a bit sad to turn that last page.