Kate Atkinson tries her hand at crime fiction with When Will There Be Good News? Expect her usually vivid characters and flourishes of fantasy, writes Leoni Munslow

When her family is attacked down a quiet country lane, Joanna escapes into the wheat.

Some 30 years later, the man that murdered all of her family comes back into her life. The life she has set up not as a victim, but as a successful doctor with a family of her own.

Across the other side of the country, Atkinson’s former detective character Jackson Brodie is trying to piece his own family back together.

Brodie first emerged as a notable figure in Case Histories, and while his tragic past is eluded to in her new novel, you don’t need to have read the earlier ones first to be au fait with his story.

When Dr Hunter goes missing, it is her orphaned nanny – Reggie, who raises the alarm. Unprepared to lose the only person who cares for her, Reggie is on a mission.

Recruiting Chief Inspector Louise Munroe, also from Case Histories, is only her first challenge. With newly-released prisoners, arson and fraud all rearing their ugly head, Munroe has her own reasons for finding Hunter.

With Kate Atkinson’s eye for detail and subtle guides throughout, these seemingly independent stories are intricately tied together from the start. From past encounters and unlucky coincidences, the characters need each other more than they realise.

As with all of Atkinson’s work, her impressive literary knowledge is worked into the text; she uses hints of Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Robert Browning’s The Last Duchess to subtly hint at the forthcoming action or enhance the characters further.

This intertextuality only adds to her writing, granting extra information for those who see her references, followed by more explicit indications for those who don’t.

In her previous works such as One Good Turn, Atkinson’s skill for developing dramatic yet believable and realistic characters is her selling point. The mystery and crime are appealing because the reader yearns to find out what is happening to the people she writes about.

Her book Human Croquet leaps beyond the realms of fact and requires a degree of suspended disbelief, but for this you are rewarded with an exciting yet bizarre treat.

Contrastingly, When Will There Be Good News? is sold as crime fiction and therefore this level of fantasy is not expected yet the coincidences and connections are just a step too far to be explained rationally.

Brodie’s family revelation at the end of the novel is unnecessary and almost appears as part of a separate story altogether, making the novel fall awkwardly somewhere between fantasy and reality.

Atkinson steps away from the style of her debut novel and demonstrates she can’t be contained within a literary genre - and this fact should be celebrated. Her writing style is witty, compelling and exciting, and if you are prepared to broaden your horizons and disregard the rational problems then this is the book for you.