As one character observes to Brodie, "Nice coincidence, although I always say that a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." Still, Atkinson has employed this narrative strategy in the previous Brodie novels, from "Case Histories" on, so there's really no point in complaining. Sometimes the coincidences stack so high that it grows tiring to stand on tiptoe to peer over them.
As the plot progresses, she follows the trail of causation all the way through to how "the kingdom was lost." Atkinson uses the traditional verse "For want of a nail the shoe was lost. Of course, at the plot's climax, her path will once again cross that of Tracy and Brodie.Īlmost everyone in "Started Early, Took My Dog" is connected in some unexpected way.
Slipping slowly into dementia, Tilly finds herself forgetting her lines on the job and conflating the past with the present.
She witnesses Tracy's interaction with Kelly Cross at the mall and is later the recipient of another spontaneous act of kindness by Brodie. The third point of the narrative triangle is Tilly, an elderly actress finishing a stint on a police procedural TV show. Suddenly responsible again for the well-being of another living creature, Brodie is a bit distracted as he follows clues that lead him toward Waterhouse and her secrets, both new and old. Almost without thinking, Waterhouse makes a Faustian bargain with Cross that completely upends her heretofore well-ordered life.īrodie, meanwhile, is searching for the biological parents of a client in New Zealand when he comes to the rescue of a small dog being abused by its owner. It's there that she witnesses Kelly Cross - prostitute, drug addict, thief and no one's idea of a responsible mother - manhandling a small girl. What they found inside still haunts them both more than 30 years later.Īs the novel opens, Arkwright is nearing retirement and Waterhouse has already made the jump, heading security at a shopping mall. In 1975, Constable Tracy Waterhouse and her partner, Ken Arkwright, were called to investigate a disturbing stench emanating from a locked apartment. In "Started Early, Took My Dog," her fourth novel featuring ex-cop, ex-private detective Jackson Brodie, Kate Atkinson follows three plotlines in the present day and one lingering from the dark days of the Yorkshire Ripper's reign of terror in the 1970s.
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