In the book's first hundred pages or so, Atkinson develops her characters at a leisurely pace, making them so interesting we almost forget this is supposed to be a mystery.

Harry, Crystal muses, 'was a funny boy, young for his age but also old for his age.' His most trusted confidant is Bunny, a burly drag queen who performs at the creaky old burlesque theater where Harry has a backstage job. 'She was a construction, made from artificial materials - the acrylic nails, the silicone breasts, the polymer eyelashes.' But there's sterner stuff under all that plastic, especially when danger threatens Crystal's toddler daughter, Candy, whom she dresses 24/7 in princess outfits, and her gawky but lovable teenage stepson, Harry. 'Crystal was hovering around thirty-nine years old and it took a lot of work to stay in this holding pattern,' Atkinson writes. That business will be a seismic shock for Tommy's trophy wife, Crystal, a shock that reaches back to her darkest secrets.

Always, though, he's motivated by his hard-earned empathy for victims and survivors: 'By the time Jackson was thirteen his mother was already dead of cancer, his sister had been murdered and his brother had killed himself, helpfully leaving his body - hanging from the light fitting - for Jackson to find when he came home from school.' She presided over the court of women.'īrodie can be a talented investigator, if sometimes distracted by his messy personal life. In a meta twist, she stars in a TV cop series she also lives full time in Brodie's imagination, which echoes with sharp retorts to his every wrong move by 'Judge Julia in his head. The town is notable for being the spot where, in Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula first landed in England one character works in a ramshackle tourist attraction called Transylvania World.īrodie's work life mostly involves tailing cheaters, whose 'bridled passion' isn't very interesting: 'Entrapping unfaithful boyfriends and husbands wasn't dealing with criminals, just high-functioning morons.'Įarly in the book, Brodie devotes most of his energy to trying to establish a relationship with his disdainful teenage son, Nathan, and mooning after the boy's mother, Brodie's ex-lover Julia. A former soldier and police officer, he is a private investigator now, living quietly (not for long) on a picturesque stretch of the Yorkshire coast near Whitby. After nine years' leave, it's a delight to see Brodie back.

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