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Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
Tracy Waterhouse is a large woman, with firm opinions and a quiet, ordered life. Retired from her work as a police detective, her life takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging her young daughter through town, both miserable and obviously better off without each other. Or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly burdened with a small child and no clue how to care for her, Tracy soon learns her inexperience is actually the least of her problems, and much larger ones are waiting for her and her young charge.
Rezensionen (3)
Guardian Review
Two ex-coppers make impulse decisions one day in Leeds. One is Tracy Waterhouse, now a security guard, who offers a junkie pounds 2,000 for the little girl she is yelling at. The other is Jackson Brodie, Atkinson's melancholic private investigator, who grabs a mistreated dog from its owner. The heart of the detective story is Leeds in the 1970s when Tracy was a young copper and Peter Sutcliffe was beginning his killing spree, but the soul of the narrative lies in Atkinson's bleak but witty descriptions of an atomised, contemporary Yorkshire where Tracy feeds her loneliness on Gregg's sausage rolls and Brodie is only comfortable in featureless hotels or the car that takes him from one dead-end clue to another in search of a client's birth parents. Lost and stolen girls are the common feature that inevitably bring Tracy and Brodie together. Atkinson uses the crime genre as the loosest of devices, but it is Brodie's fondness for Emily Dickinson that provides the leitmotif: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant . . ." - Isobel Montgomery Two ex-coppers make impulse decisions one day in Leeds. One is Tracy Waterhouse, now a security guard, who offers a junkie pounds 2,000 for the little girl she is yelling at. The other is Jackson Brodie, Atkinson's melancholic private investigator, who grabs a mistreated dog from its owner. - Isobel Montgomery.
New York Review of Books-Rezension
Kate Atkinson returns to a crime series, with layered mysteries and studies in human nature. IT'S West Yorkshire not long before the Yorkshire Ripper starts his killing spree, and two police officers make a grisly discovery. Behind a locked door in a block of flats lies the decomposing body of a woman. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is there's a child locked in with her, "filthy, nothing but skin and bone," looking "like a famine victim." Slain women have become a staple of Kate Atkinson's crime novels, which also feature the gruff yet protective ex-cop, ex-P.I., ex-husband and father of two, Jackson Brodie. "Started Early, Took My Dog" is the fourth book in a series noted for its unorthodoxy. The Brodie novels are twisting, turning, tangled narratives that leap from decade to decade, character to character, with the secrets playing second fiddle to Atkinson's sad and funny studies in human nature. Age 45 when we first met him in 2004 in "Case Histories," Jackson is now 50, and, in four books covering five years, he has been through several lifetimes' worth of ordeals (winning and losing a fortune, marrying a grifter, barely surviving a train crash, to mention just a few). Jackson is "off the grid" now, semiretired, picking up jobs that mostly involve looking for people, though "not necessarily finding them." His current assignment is to trace the biological parents of a woman named Hope McMaster, adopted back in the 1970s when she was 2 by a British couple who promptly moved their little family to New Zealand. (He's also hoping to find his second ex-wife, the one who "had taken him for the longest of cons - seduced, courted, married and robbed him blind.") Hard-won clues soon lead Jackson to the door of Tracy Waterhouse, one of those two unlucky West Yorkshire officers whose 1975 flashback opened the book. But she isn't at home, and Jackson isn't the only person looking for her. Precisely where she is and what she's doing is another of the book's many mysteries. Not long retired from the force, she now works on a security detail at a local shopping complex. Doing her rounds one day, she encounters a woman she knows from her police days (a "prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey"), who has in her clutches a screaming child. Tracy follows the pair to a bus stop where, inexplicably - "Tracy didn't know how it happened" - she offers to buy the child for £3,000. The woman accepts. Jackson can't find Tracy because she's trying not to be found. She's hiding out with her new acquisition, a little girl named Courtney, making plans to change their identities and take flight as "Imogen Brown and her little girl, Lucy." She imagines "walking hand in hand with the kid into a clean, untarnished, white future. She would make up for all the other lost kids. One fallen fledgling popped back into the nest." Good-hearted Tracy: over 50, overweight and in over her head. She tells herself she's rescuing Courtney, and perhaps she is. But Courtney's true identity is hazy, and as some 35-year-old questions begin to be answered troubling parallels emerge. Decades from now, will the anguish of Hope McMaster, the woman Jackson is tracing - the woman with "the black hole at the beginning of her life" - repeat itself for Courtney? Is Tracy trying to save a mistreated little girl or herself? Atkinson's characters tend to have bleak pasts, which she mines most expertly, if sometimes to the point of distraction. Jackson, as we learned in "Case Histories," has never recovered from his sister's unsolved murder. It chases him through all these novels, fostering his intensity and his protective concern for women. (Like the matter of Courtney's questionable identity, Jackson's personal cold case seems to warrant its own book.) Tracy's childhood wasn't so much traumatic as bare and unloving, precisely not what she has planned for Courtney. As for Tilly . . . Wait, Tilly? Who's Tilly? Tilly is an elderly actress playing a role that's largely peripheral to the book's central mysteries, but which taps into its themes of loss and regret. Like so many of the women in these pages, Tilly is mourning a lost chance at motherhood, in her case because of a miscarriage "back in the Soho days." (There's a passing reference to a woman who has "no kids, by choice," but she's "hard-nosed" and likes her "lifestyle" too much.) Past sorrows are coming back to life for Tilly, even as the present is disappearing, falling through the cracks in her mind. Atkinson conveys Tilly's dementia through an intense stream-of-consciousness narrative in which thoughts slide hither and thither, from Tweets to Tweety-pie, billabong to billy, coddled eggs to coddling a child. ("'Coddle' was a lovely word, like cuddle. If Tilly had a little girl to look after she would coddle her.") It's during one of those many bewildered moments (she's in a mall, disoriented and suspected of shoplifting) that Tilly chances upon Jackson, who lends her a comforting hand. "So nice," she thinks, "to encounter a proper gentleman these days." Women of every age are drawn to Jackson. And he certainly does have an air of the strong, silent, poetry-loving (Emily Dickinson!) British detective about him. He's far too irreverent to wear Adam Dalgliesh's shoes, of course, but that only adds to Jackson's appeal. Consider, for a moment, how he puts his newly discovered violent side to use: by slugging a mean, tattooed, barrel-chested thug in order to rescue a small dog, that's how. Rescuing dogs, children and little old ladies? Isn't Atkinson starting to lay it on a bit thick? Sure. But it's terribly charming. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New Zealand.
Library Journal-Rezension
Investigator Jackson Brodie just can't seem to stay retired. His fourth outing has him tracking down the birth parents of his latest client. Along the way, he rescues a dog, which has its own problems. Add to the mix a retired childless ex-cop who buys a toddler from a junkie. It's complicated, but narrator Graeme Malcolm masterfully handles the material. (LJ 7/11) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.