Despite lively acting, splashy production values, and rich source material, Case Histories offers precious little genuine detection and a lot of aimless jumping around from case to case and client to client. And with that, he becomes just one more private ‘tec with a wobbly personal life, no head for business, and, of course, the Dark Tragic Secret that has haunted him since childhood. The BBC adaptation of Atkinson’s novels turns Brodie into a conventional private eye, fixed in an office, with a bolshie assistant and a nice view of Victoria Street. Existentially adrift, he temporarily touches other people’s lives, but is never fully bound to them. Her protagonist, Jackson Brodie, who mooches off the page as a kinder, gentler, but no less determined, Jack Reacher, is an essential part of her alchemy. Her skill goes a long way toward disarming the reader’s nagging disbelief that quite so many coincidences would occur in quite so many disparate lives. The charm of Kate Atkinson’s genre-bending crime novels lies in their balancing of the body blows and the grace notes of chance.
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