everyone in this has such an unpleasant lifestory in a way which feels… untrue. relatedly, this is all very grim. detective fiction, not as in mystery (which would require a plot and also solving, instead of stumbling), but as in crime (horrible things happen in ur backyard!!!)
ultimately am pretty perplexed by the structure of this. maybe that’s exacerbated by the audiobook, but it felt like information was repeated quite often, and especially towards the end it just all got a bit messy and irrelevant.
i also googled, at least twice, ‘jackson brodie daughter’ because there was so much chat about jb’s difficulty with his teen son without reference to her, that i started to think she was made up for the tv show. then, halfway thru, the son disappears and the daughter becomes the actual emotional climax of the book? it felt like atkinson forgot, then suddenly remembered, what brodie's kid sitch was. it just stood out as quite messy, especially in a book which draw attention to itself as part of a series, by requiring you to remember characters and moments from past books (which i dont)