Pun Salad

I'm hooked on Kate Atkinson's sleuth series featuring Jackson Brodie; this is number six. (My reports here, here, here, here, and here.) I think it's safe to say this book differs somewhat from previous entries, which were occasionally funny, but mostly grim. This one is pretty hilarious in spots, and the grimness is turned down quite a bit. The word "farce" appears a couple times in the text, and that's kind of appropriate.

A brief opening scene teases the "Murder Mystery Weekend" held in "Burton Makepeace", a decrepit English manor house; think "Downton Abbey", where things have gone to seed in the modern age. Brodie's there with his unwilling partner from a previous book, Reggie. But why?

Flash back a bit: Private eye Brodie is hired to track down a stolen painting, a portrait of a lady with a pine marten on her lap. (Brodie thinks of it as "Woman With Weasel".) This was apparently an occasional theme in Renaissance art; you can look up Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, for one example. It turns out the most likely theft suspect is a mysterious servant who disappeared along with the painting. And it also turns out there have been similar-MO thefts over the years.

There are multiple POVs, as usual with Atkinson; there's a village vicar who's lost his voice. And a veteran who's lost his leg. They all find their way to the manor in the middle of a nasty blizzard, and get caught up with the ramshackle "murder mystery" play being put on by an indifferent bunch of actors. And there's an actual murder victim along the way.

At more than a few spots in the book, Atkinson's colorful prose put me in mind of good old Raymond Chandler; would it be totally crazy for the Chandler estate to commission Kate to write a Philip Marlowe mystery? Then on the back cover I read a blurb from the WaPo, referring to a previous book as "Raymond Chandler meets Jane Austen", so I guess not totally crazy.