Hunter that the man who killed her family is being paroled after 30 years in jail, we realize that the doctor is Joanna Mason, now married to shady businessman and the fiercely devoted mother of a baby boy just the age of her brother when he died. Reggie, starved for love after her mother’s accidental death, basks in the warmth of her employer, Dr. Atkinson skillfully elicits our sympathy for each as she vividly traces their individual histories and creates a gallery of full-bodied personalities. The only mystery in the novel’s first third is how members of this disparate group of people are connected to each other. Then it’s on to Louise Monroe, a divorced Edinburgh police officer recently and uneasily remarried to a surgeon, who spends much of her time ruminating over the horrific cases she’s worked on, many involving murderous domestic violence. Back to Jackson for a quick flash to inform us that he’s on a personal mission. Then we meet Reggie Chase, an indomitable 16-year-old orphan working as a mother’s helper in Edinburgh while she studies for her A levels. The scene abruptly shifts to Yorkshire, where Jackson Brodie seems to be pursuing an investigation. He kills the mother, eldest daughter, infant son, and even the dog only six-year-old Joanna Mason manages to run away, to be found hours later by police in a field of wheat. The novel opens with a grim chapter in which a knife-wielding lunatic attacks a family strolling down a country lane in Devon. Her iconoclasm may at first disconcert readers expecting conventional narrative development. When Will There Be Good News? is her third book featuring police-officer-turned-private-eye Jackson Brodie, and Atkinson initially seems to flout every genre requirement but in the end comes through with a series of dazzling twists of plot (and fate) that not only tell us whodunit but remind us that this risk-taking author never does what’s expected. Awful events befall an awful lot of people in British author Kate Atkinson’s seventh novel-which makes the title both darkly appropriate and robustly ironic in a manner that perfectly suits this marvelous author’s sui generis style.

When will there be good news book