Life After Life is one of my favorite books ever. A God Among Ruins is up there. So I have a soft spot for Kate Atkinson. But I really don’t know about these Jackson Brodie books.

1. The characters, or maybe Kate Atikinson herself, are obsessed with weight and fatness. It gets old. And it feels unnecessary, and therefore mean.

2. Jackson Brodie happens to turn up in all these books. But he’s not solving any mysteries. In every book, a lot of seemingly unrelated plots progress slowly toward each other, and Jackson just happens to be a character in one of those plots, carried along with everyone else. I suppose we could talk about it as a comment on detective fiction and fictional PIs and blah blah blah.

3. I really disliked the first half of this one but it got better --about the time that some of the plots started to converge. I never did figure out how Matilda/Tilly was connected to everyone. Maybe that's lazy reading on my part. Which leads me back to the question of what I want out of my crime fiction. Something less "literary", apparently.

So now I'm not sure whether to bother with the next one. I will, probably. Smdh.