Oh "golly" ... if you like Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and/or Elizabeth Jane Howard, on the English side, or Lee Child and/or Harlen Coben, on the American side, you are really going to like Kate Atkinson's "Case Histories". I have just finished it, loved it, and my next activity will be to order all her other books. The characters! The descriptive excellence! Jackson the detective! This is our kind of book, kids, and it should be on some Murdoch-Drabble-Howard list ... really immensely enjoyable!

Case Histories is a bit depressing at times--it chronicles the senseless tragedy of several deaths--but it's a gripping and well paced drama-mystery that keeps the reader churning ahead till the end of the novel to find out not so much whodunnit, but why.

Atkinson writes with deserved confidence, and her characters are carefully sketched in a minimum of text. She also describes a fascinating, but not new, social phenomenon of women who became mothers by default and inertia--only to discover they don't like children at all.

I admit I was a bit saddened to learn the killers' identies and motives, because there's so much sadness perpetuated by these crimes and it's awful to discover they were spawned by sickening personal vices. Not a cheering read, but well written and interesting.