Along the way, she introduces threads from the past, including another lost toddler from a 1975 murder scene investigated by Waterhouse. How Atkinson interweaves these lives - in the past, the present and the uncertain future - is her particular gift as a writer, and her plot remains clear and straight even as she unfolds her stories at leisure. When the producers finally decide to kill her off, sending her into retirement like Waterhouse and Brodie, it’s all Tilly can do to remember that she’s standing on a set and the woman aiming a gun at her is another actress. Tilly Squires, currently playing the mother of a detective on a cheapjack TV crime drama, is becoming known among her co-workers as “Ten-take Tilly” because of her failing faculties. Brodie finds himself with a dog he’s not quite sure what to do with.Īs Waterhouse and Brodie both get things they’re not sure they want, an elderly character actress is losing the one thing that matters to her: her memory. His split-second decision arrives when he sees a man brutalizing a small dog in a park. Meanwhile, former police inspector and private eye Jackson Brodie (returning from three of Atkinson’s previous novels) is wandering the English back roads, looking at the endless ruins of British civilization, trying to decide if all roads lead to or away from home.
Leaving work one day, she runs into an old nemesis, Kelly Cross, a “prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey.” Kelly is dragging an abused toddler onto a city bus, and in a split-second Tracy finds herself asking, “How much for the kid?” An envelope changes hands, the bus pulls away, and Tracy is suddenly the guardian of Courtney, a solemn toddler she’d just purchased on impulse.
Recently retired policewoman Tracy Waterhouse, a 50ish woman with no particular attachments and no plans for the rest of her life, has taken a job as security director of a Leeds, England, shopping mall, more out of boredom than anything else. “To the Pythagoreans, three was the first real number, because they saw it as having a beginning, a middle and an end,” says a character early in Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, the excellent “ Started Early, Took My Dog.” Atkinson goes on to introduce three characters and interweave meditations on other sets of three - particularly beginnings, middles and ends. “STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG,” by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur/Little Brown.
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