I first heard of this author and this book from a Top 10 Best of the Year list by Stephen King a couple of years back. I was definitely intrigued as he mentioned that it was so well written that he had to re-read it all over again when he finished. So I kept in on my list of books to buy everytime I found myself at the bookstore.
2 years later, I finally bought it… and read it.
I can’t say that I had the same enthusiasm as Stephen King, I didn’t have the need to jump back to the beginning and go at it all over again, but then again, I have NEVER re-read a novel twice. I’ve read Tintin books more than once, but never a novel. I’ve often seen movies more than once, but never had the need to do it with a book. Although, in 10 or 15 years, I might read the Shopoholic or the Harry Potter collection again.
Case Histories was like nothing I had ever read before. It takes 4 different crime stories, from different decades, in different parts of Cambridge and little by little bring them together by meshing a member of one family with one from another, and so on. All the stories are told through Jackson Brodie, a retired policeman, now a private investigator with a sordid past of his own. I can tell you there are not many happy moments in this novel, but it certainly never is boring. Case Histories is structurally similar to the movie CRASH, sometimes the main character in one storyline will make a cameo appearance in parts of another story.
I found this book to be an amazing study of how lives are destroyed by crimes left unsolved for years, for decades, mainly due to botched investigation, tiny little errors of judgement that could’ve put an end to the sorrow and misery of those left behind by finding the answer right there and then. And how, as humans, we have the need for closure, the need to know what has happened, who is guilty, where missing people have dissapeared to, and just how it consumes us.
The characters keep you interested, but it is really her writing style that captured my attention more. As I was reading, I kept trying to figure out how she did it and kept coming to the same solution everytime, that she must have written it backwards, starting with the end and then decomposing it into 4 different stories… I loved this book.
Sounds like fun…I gotta keep an eye out for this one. I think most mystery-type stories must be written backwards. Or at least thought of backwards. And speaking of Stephen King, I wish that’s something he would do more of. Maybe it’s fun writing books when you don’t know how it will end, but it makes his endings less fun to read.