Case Histories

Kate Atkinson has put away the crockery, closed up the dishwasher and gone out of the kitchen door into the dark. Case Histories, her fourth novel since Behind the Scenes at the Museum, kicks off with a few unconnected vignettes: a three-year-old girl disappears one hot morning; a solicitor witnesses the violent death of his beloved daughter; a struggling mother loses her temper with her husband and reaches for the axe. That's three families shattered in the space of 50 pages - a sign that cosy domestic drama, of the sort that won the hearts of the judges who awarded Behind the Scenes the 1995 Whitbread prize, has been left behind.

To start your novel with three such shocking set-pieces is brave, and, if you're good, effective: it bludgeons the reader into a state of mild depression that cries out for closure. Atkinson is very good indeed, and she makes her tragedies unbearably small-scale and human - never gory. What's more, she addresses the balance by immediately bringing in the central character, Jackson, a private eye (ex-police) and all-round good bloke, if a touch bitter and cynical - which is really what you want in your private eyes.

Jackson swims into the diminishing ripples of the three cases - all of which happened more than a decade ago - and begins to work out what really happened. He is a reluctant detective, yet he has an ineluctable conscience. Asked by the obese and eternally grieving Theo Wyre to find his daughter's murderer, Jackson takes on the near-hopeless task.

Jackson's fuzzy, semi-articulated desire to right the world's wrongs acts as a counterweight to the brutal deeds committed by faceless figures. "Amelia and Julia Land had found something," he thinks, reflecting on two sisters' discovery of their lost infant sibling's favourite toy. "Theo Wyre had lost something. How easy life would be if it could be one and the same thing."

In a way, his wish is granted: Case Histories is essentially a balancing act, with evil and ignorance stacked opposite truth and healing. In this aspect the book is more satisfying than many detective novels - not just because it is so well written, but in its defiant refusal to let the dark side win the day merely for the sake of looking gritty and "real". Of course, Case Histories is not all sunshine and trite happy endings, but this is a book that rests on a strong and well-constructed moral framework, and is all the more powerful for it.

Where Atkinson slips up is in carrying this balancing act right down to individual characters. By about two-thirds of the way through the book, it's clear that there are a certain number of missing persons (some presumed dead, others just lost), and a certain number of people with backgrounds unaccounted for.

On one fatal page Atkinson lists their ages - "Tanya would be 25," and so on - and it's too tempting, especially for the keen mystery-reader, not to flip back and work out from the dates at the chapter heads who will turn out to be whom. (You can imagine Ruth Rendell choking on her coffee at such a giveaway.) Here the book is reduced to a puzzle, and the tragedy dwindles to a commonplace.

Not for long, though - Atkinson has a way of yanking you back with the tiniest details. She is perfectly happy to let a cheap pottery wishing-well carry the full weight of a lifetime's grief, and she loads it up with such skill that you seem to feel the shards cutting your hand.

Similarly, it's the most incongruous emotions she brings out, like a painter putting a sly daub of red in the eye, that are the most moving: when one of the missing is found face down on the riverbank, one character recalls that "the first feeling was of relief that they had found her, that she wouldn't be out there, lost for ever".

I suspect that this is one of those protean novels that will resonate differently according to its readers' own private tragedies: some will find the painful core of the book in the story of the lost sister, others will focus on the grief of the father for his child. Others still will take comfort from nice-guy Jackson and his drive to bring restorative truth to the wounded. But everyone who picks it up will feel compelled to follow Case Histories through to the last page - and not just for closure.