If you’re interested in a detective story set in Scotland, look no further. I’ve picked up Kate Atkinson after reading Life after Life and I hoped this book will live up to the hype. Unfortunately, it didn’t do it for me. The writer and detective, as he himself proclaims, has a very boring internal life and is prone to monologue-ing his way out of every situation. And there were no golden heroes here: all the characters were flawed and often difficult to like – and one casually dropped anecdote about Jackson and his relationship with Julia was particularly difficult to swallow – but real. And if our interior monologues and memories were laid bare, how many of us would escape unsullied?

You started off liking someone because of who they were and you ended up wanting them to be different.

He had never strived for greatness and his reward had been a small life.

It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident – a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander – until he becomes a murder suspect.

As the body count mounts, each member of the teeming Dickensian cast’s story contains a kernel of the next, like a set of nesting Russian dolls. They are all looking for love or money or redemption or escape: but what each actually discovers is their own true self.

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Marty Canning, a weak dissatisfied writer whose life is dull and without excitement, is involved in a violent incident in a car park, this leads to his name becoming attached to a series of crimes, in a way that is all very unlikely.

Jackson Brodie, whilst out sightseeing finds a dead Russian girl in the water. Somehow all these people are connected, but how?

And this is essentially the issue. They are all connected or all end up connected, Jackson Brodie and Marty through the car park incident, the Russian girls to Graham Hatter, employees of Hatter to incidents which befall both Brodie and Canning. It’s just too many coincidences and too implausible.

Jackson, no longer a private eye has no reason to be where he is most of the time and even new heroine Louise Munroe tells him he’s “becoming a professional witness”. It’s not just unlikely that he would become embroiled in all these events it’s borderline impossible, statistically. It just made me roll my eyes a bit.

I hope it isn’t too spoilery to say there is a crime scene near the end; but the fact that not one, not two, but three witnesses are able to walk from said crime scene without police intervention beggars total belief.

There are multiple separate plots that all fit together too well and just as something exciting happens, we’re whizzed away to another thread. The book goes on too long as loose ends that weren’t loose are tied up, e.g. when I read about the murder in the final chapter I thought the victim had died 9 chapters earlier. You could probably lose the whole Friday section without detracting from the story.