Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

I love Kate Atkinson’s novels - it’s not often that you get good prose writing and intricate characterisation in a thriller. Usually they’re plot-driven. But in hers you know you’re in for a feast of good writing as well as an interesting plot.
Started Early,  Took My Dog  is another novel in the sequence of her Jackson Brodie books and this time he’s on the trail of an adopted child’s birth family. Jackson witnesses a small dog being beaten in a park and snatches it from its owner. On the same day a retired police officer, now working as a security guard at a shopping mall, impulsively acquires an abused and neglected child at a bus stop. Add into the mix an elderly actress featuring in a northern soap who is in the early stages of dementia, stir thoroughly and allow to settle. The result is fascinating and unpredictable. It involves the solution of a 30 year old crime, several corrupt police officers, an incompetent social worker and three women desperate to have a child. To say any more would be a spoiler!