Review

Death at the Sign of the Rook
by Kate Atkinson
Vintage Books, UK, 2025

If you’ve never read one of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books, you can jump in here as I did.  Jackson Brodie is a former police inspector, now a private detective. He’s hit middle age, is world-weary, but still tirelessly pursuing the case at hand. We find him at the service of middle-aged twins, Hazel and Ian Padgett. Their mother, Dorothy, has recently died and a valuable painting (probably), which hung in her room —The Woman with a Weasel—has disappeared. Quite coincidentally, Dorothy’s helper, the young Melanie Hope, has also disappeared.

In another household, at Burton Makepeace, the huge, old country estate now partially converted into a hotel to cover costs, Lady Milton —who despises the current set-up, which her son Piers arranged — has discovered a Turner painting is missing. Curiously, it disappeared along with Lady Milton’s serving girl, one Sophie Greenway. Could Melanie and Sophie be one of the same?

Also on the case is detective constable Reggie Chase, who partners up with Jackson though it’s not the most agreeable relationship.

Meanwhile, at the hotel; i.e., a wing of Burton Makepeace, in order to earn even more money, Piers has put together a Murder Mystery weekend, with guests already booked. The motley crew of fly-by-night actors hired for the event arrives, makes itself at home in the “hotel,” and begins preparing for their roles.

A huge cast of characters enters, such as Simon Cate the vicar, who will lose his voice; Ben Jennings, a former Army major struggling with trauma and one leg; Lady Milton’s other two children, Cosmo and Arabella—and, of course, a real murderer on the loose in the area. To top it off, a massive snowstorm hits the weekend of the Murder Mystery, confounding everything.

If it isn’t clear already, this is a rollicking mystery, with many diversions, that has more in common with Only Murders in the Building than a traditional crime novel. What makes it special is Atkinson’s superb prose. Her crisp, dry humor plays with the language of the country-estate mystery, reminiscent of Agatha Christie—taking tea in the “increasingly dilapidated conservatory,”  serving “sponge drops”;  remembering the very old butler who had “just sort of faded away, so they hardly missed him when he went”—but it is not a parody.  Gentle irony abounds, but there is an emotional depth as well, as seen in the vicar’s loss of faith, Ben’s post-traumatic stress, and Jackson Brodie’s middle-age malaise. At the same time, Atkinson playfully highlights Lady Milton’s vanity and the decline of the old social order. It’s a fun and meditative novel, for those who don’t mind farce in their mystery. J.A.