Great thriller which I could not put down. Brilliant characters, and twists and turns. Highly recommend to others! Absolutely loving this series.

I love Jackson Brodie books and was so excited to receive a copy of the newest book in the series. At always Kate Atkinson did not disappoint. I adored this story and loved catching up with Brodie. As always the story was brilliantly written and kept me on the edge of my seat to the very end. I can’t wait to read the next book in the series.

I love Kate Atkinson and I love Jackson Brodie.

When I am thinking of fictional male investigators, there are only two worth considering as real people: Harry Nelson from Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway books, and Jackson. They are the thinking women’s sleuths, and I love them both.

It is a continuing mystery as to why the Ruth books have not been televised (but who, who would play Harry? Would the wrong actor be worse than nothing?) – but there is joy in the fact that we had Jason Isaacs embodying Jackson on TV: could we have more please?

Also more books – look at that nine-year gap. Of course Atkinson was producing her other, wonderful novels (see particularly Life after Life and Transcription). But oh the joy of sinking into another mysterious slice of Northern life. In both these books the author wanders round among a huge circle of characters, telling you what they are thinking, taking her time. There are loopy timeschemes and great long periods in which nothing much seems to be happening, and you are worried that you have forgotten which character is which. But she always, always makes it work.

I always feel she would be thrown out of creative writing classes, because she breaks all the rules, but then she can, because she is just the most marvellous writer.

The characters are so real and so convincing. There are some very very dark deeds and moments in both books, and times (test of a real immersive novel) where you want to yell at someone ‘don’t do it!’ as if you can change the course of the plot. There are wicked, wicked people.

And yet amid the grim reality – and there’s nothing here that you don’t think is, has been and will be happening in real life – there are her redemptive moments, the moments where two people bond, or just look out for each other, the belief that there are terrible times around, but there will also always be goodness. (There is a description, 2 paragraphs, in Big Sky of a Mother’s Day....)





Corruption, sex trafficking, drugs, prostitution, lost children – and at the same time virtue, and some morality, and also endless jokes – Atkinson does social observation at every level so well, and is one of the funniest writers we have.

Justine Jordan wrote this about ‘Started Early...’ in the Guardian:

So much of the narrative is retrospective or interior that there's not much urgency to unfolding events, however highly coloured. And there's a rhetorical whimsy reminiscent of some of Atkinson's earlier books, a devil-may-care gesturing at the novel's own fictionality, which can leave the characters threatening to float free of our trust in them. But we follow their digressive, meandering voices avidly as they circle around their own particular loves and losses, all knitted together with Atkinson's extraordinary combination of wit, plain-speaking, tenderness and control

– which summed up very well how I think of the Jackson Brodie books.

The perfect, authentic details of people’s lives are amazing – ‘she should haul her old Rosemary Conley tapes out of the boxes in the spare room’ and ‘her mother had dressed her in limp pinafore dresses and nylon jumpers with brown lace-up Clarks shoes, a look which even a cute kid, let alone Tracy, would have trouble pulling off.’

A play area attacked to a pub, the ultimate dream of the Useless Parenting classes
The thin card of the manila folder was soft and felted with age. This was what folders used to be like before they became pink neon plastic
Ida’s been hacking with Buttons all afternoon – Reggie couldn’t even begin to translate that sentence. She presumed that Buttons had nothing to do with Cinderella, and, equally, that hacking had nothing to do with computers.

‘She's in my book club.’
‘Your book club?’ Andy didn’t know which was more startling - that […] had been murdered or that Rhoda was in a book club.
‘First rule of book club,’ Rhoda said, ‘there is no book club.’


I picked these quotes almost at random – there is a gem on every page.

She tells you what people are wearing, and also what they are listening to. She is a great, great writer.


Top picture is Jason Isaacs playing Jackson Brodie.

Some of the book takes place in Bridlington. Idly looking for pictures of the resort, I came across a handful of pics of seaside holidays in the 1930s – in, of all places, the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive (actually a great favourite blog resource). They were from an album donated by an RAF veteran, Edwin Newman. There is no direct connection with the book, but the lost innocence, the air of nostalgia, the happy families who don’t know what the future will hold, the Bridlington setting, the sheer loveliness of the picture – well, I had to use it, I think you will agree.

This is the fourth book in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. For some reason, after reading the first three in quick succession in 2015, I never moved on to this one and it was only with the publication of the fifth book, Big Sky, earlier this year that I remembered I still needed to read it. Fortunately, the Jackson Brodie novels all stand alone very well so I found that it didn’t matter at all that I had left such a long gap between books three and four.

The plot of Started Early, Took My Dog is actually quite difficult to describe, but I’ll do my best. A good place to start is probably with Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police superintendent now working as head of security at the Merrion Shopping Centre in Leeds. Tracy is lonely and bored – she has no family, no friends and no social life; she gets up in the morning, goes to work, then comes home to spend every evening alone eating chocolate in front of the television. Then, one day, as she patrols the Merrion Centre, she sees a little girl being mistreated by Kelly Cross, a prostitute and drug addict whom Tracy recognises from her police days. She makes the decision to intervene and suddenly life becomes much more eventful!

While Tracy is trying to help an abused child, in a parallel storyline the novel’s other main protagonist, private investigator Jackson Brodie, is carrying out a good deed of his own. With a series of failed relationships behind him, Jackson is almost as lonely as Tracy, and when he witnesses a dog being kicked by its owner, he steps in and rescues it. The dog then becomes his inseparable companion as he embarks on his latest case – trying to trace the biological parents of Hope McMaster, a woman who was adopted as a child and grew up in New Zealand. This proves to be more difficult than he expected, because as soon as he starts asking questions it becomes obvious that those who do know the truth about Hope’s parentage will do anything to cover it up.

Jackson’s story quickly begins to intertwine with Tracy’s when he discovers that the murder of a woman in 1975 – a murder scene at which Tracy, then a young police officer, had been present – may have had something to do with the mystery of Hope’s origins. The novel moves backwards and forwards between the 1970s and 2010, showing how the events of the past have had an impact on the events of the present. Some of Tracy’s actions and choices following her encounter with the little girl in the Merrion Centre, for example, seem implausible at first but make more sense once you gain a deeper understanding of her background and her earlier experiences.

As with the other Jackson Brodie books, I found that the crime element of this one took second place to the characters. I thought Tracy was a great character and I loved her relationship with little Courtney, and, similarly, I enjoyed watching Jackson bonding with his new canine companion. The other character who stood out for me was Tilly, an elderly actress who is in the early stages of dementia; the way Kate Atkinson portrays Tilly’s fear and confusion over what is happening felt, to me, very convincing and very moving.

While the characters I’ve mentioned above were excellent, however, there were too many others whom I struggled to distinguish from each other; in particular, the other police officers involved in the 1975 storyline all seemed to blend into one which made that part of the book difficult to follow. There were also some subplots that didn’t seem to go anywhere and some important questions that remained unanswered at the end. Compared with the first three books in the series, I thought this one was disappointing. I’m sure I will still read Big Sky, but there are also a few other Kate Atkinson books I haven’t read yet: Transcription, Emotionally Weird and Not the End of the World.

Thank you - we featured Kate Atkinson on Caboodle (website and newsletter) in 2019! We look forward to working with you in 2020.

5★
“He supposed he would end up having to put himself down. He planned to go out on the ice (I may be some time), lie down with a bottle of something as old as himself and drift off into the big sleep. He hoped global warming didn’t scupper this plan.”

Black thoughts, funny, human, but pretty much what you might expect from a lonely Yorkshire man “a West Riding man himself, made from soot and rugby league and beef dripping. . . ” who’s ended up on his own somehow, with an ex-wife and teenaged daughter, an ex-almost-wife and newly discovered little son, a lost love married to someone else and with a new baby, and now with someone else’s dog.

He’s a retired detective who can’t seem to say no to people asking for help, and he can’t stand by and watch anyone mistreated, which is how he finds himself with a dog that was being bashed up. It’s a bright, perky little thing, probably not what he would choose, and it does cramp his lifestyle a bit.

“He couldn’t believe the number of places that dogs weren’t allowed. Kids – not that he had anything against kids obviously – kids were allowed everywhere and dogs were much better behaved on the whole.”

He stopped to help a ditzy old lady, obviously suffering from dementia, which is what prompted his thoughts of going out on the ice like the old First Peoples of Canada when they’re too old to chew the fat.

He’s had some cards printed up to show he’s a private investigator, although it’s not what he intended to do – it’s just that he’s good at it. He does worry that his memory is not functioning quite as quickly as it did.

“Jackson tried to remember why but the tiny people who resentfully ran his memory these days (fetching and carrying folders, checking the contents against index cards, filing them away in boxes that were then placed on endless rows of grey metal Dexion shelving never to be found again) had, in an all too frequent occurrence, mislaid that particular piece of information. This sketchy blueprint for the neurological workings of his brain had been laid down in Jackson’s childhood by the Numskulls in his Beezer comic and he had never really developed a more sophisticated model.”

I like to say my auto-pilot needs recalibrating. I’d never considered little people flitting around in my brain searching through filing cabinets, but who knows?

Silly Tilly, the elderly, absent-minded actress whom Jackson helped and who turns out to be appearing in a TV show with Julia (his ex-not-wife) plays a rather major role in a few places in this book – all of them pretty unexpected. But that’s an Atkinson story for you. You never know who’s going to pop up connected to whom. We always know before Jackson does.

This one is about stolen, missing, or misplaced children – more than one – and it’s something I don’t think I ever realised was as common as it may well be. We had livestock for many years, and while we like to think that animal mothers know their own (and they usually do), they will often foster odd-bods who’ve been left out for some reason. [My Goodreads review includes some personal memories under a "spoiler".]


I love all of Atkinson’s work, and this is fun because it refers back to people and events from past books. You can enjoy it as a stand-alone, because she’s very good at giving enough background to fill you in, but it is a much more satisfying affair when you really understand who Julia is, how he feels about his ex and his daughter.

I won’t even touch on the plot. Bad guys, punch-ups, chases, and a wonderful, single, built-like-a-brick-privy retired cop Tracy Waterhouse, who “adopts” a wee girl. Such a great relationship there.

Thanks to NetGalley for the preview and Random House / Transworld for re-releasing the first four Jackson Brodie books before the fifth was released. I’ve loved the others and look forward to the new one now!

When I requested this book I didn't realise it was the third in a series featuring Jackson Brodie. This in no way spoilt my enjoyment as it reads well as a stand alone book but I am intrigued enough now to read the first two.
Well written and crafted, with a superb storyline and brilliant characterisation

This book is witty with surprise literary florishes
Excellent writing which captures your attention
This book is part of a series but could be read stand-alone

It's the fourth book in a series, so I think we've all pretty much got the hang of the rhythm of these books, including Kate Atkinson. I like them, that's why I keep reading them.

This one involves layers of interconnectedness that is largely independent from the previous books, although there are references to previous people and events.

There is one mystery here that does not get resolved, and I am very curious to read the next one in the series to see if it does continue, or if it is dead end.

Despite this book having been originally published in 2010, NetGalley gave me an e-Arc in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley for the copy of this book.
I have never read a Kate Atkinson book before, I've seen them on the shelves but just never bought one.
I didn't realise this was in a series and I like to read things in order.
However, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it will definitely make me start at the beginning and look at more of Kate's books for the future.
I've found a new author - yippee.

I love Kate Atkinson and I read this book when it first came out. A few years on i am revisiting it and it passes the test of time.. it’s a story about adoption, abuse of power, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons and the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. It’s definitely been worth rereading and reminded me how much I like the character of Jackson Brodie and also the character of Tracy Waterhouse. Recommended highly.

Fourth outing of the very popular Jackson Brodie series. Started Early, Took My Dog has all the hallmarks of a strong Atkinson tale, intriguing and memorable characters, as well as a compelling story. While I wouldn't go so far to call it the strongest in the series, fans will be happy with this offering.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc.

I'm a huge Kate Atkinson fan, but for some reason I haven't read any of the Jackson Brodie books yet, seeing them as a sort of unwelcome detour from her literary fiction.I was pleasantly surprised that the book managed to retain some of the gravitas and beauty I have come to expect from Kate Atkinson's writing. It was beautifully written, and I loved the character of Tracy in particular, whose regrets lead her into making an impulse decision that will take her life on an entirely different course than she expected. Beautifully realised characters and lots of unexpected twists make for a gripping read.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I guess that most of us have made the odd impulse purchase but Tracy Waterhouse, security chief at the Merrion Centre in Leeds, blew most people's ideas of an impulse purchase out of the water one morning. Seeing a known prostitute dragging a toddler through the shopping mall whilst cursing at her, Waterhouse followed the woman and bought the girl for £3000. The difficulty of a purchase like this is knowing what to do next and Tracy's humdrum life is replaced with one of stress, fear and an overwhelming love for four-year-old Courtney.

She might have thought that the transaction to purchase Courtney went unnoticed, but there were witnesses to what happened. One was Tilly, an aging actress teetering on the edge of dementia, and Jackson Brodie, supposedly in search of someone else's roots, but actually looking for somewhere to live and for the wife who seems to have absconded with most of his money. The money doesn't worry Jackson - it was an unlooked-for inheritance - and if he was honest, he knows that he should never have married Tessa. It's a matter of principle. He should have married Louise - but she's now married to someone else.

I read Kate Atkinson for her exquisite writing. It soothes my brain and makes me smile with delight. I know that there will be laugh-out-loud moments and that the plot will be intricate, constructed much in the way of a complex jigsaw, with every piece being important to the overall picture. I wasn't disappointed. I expected that the first part of the book would require concentration to grasp the full cast of characters and that it was likely that there would be jumps in time, but once you've accommodated all this you'll have people in your mind whom you know as intimately as many of your friends.

There's death - of course there is. Jackson Brodie seems to attract it. But there's a sense of a new beginning too. Tracy Waterhouse might have acquired Courtney, but Brodie acquires a dog. Knocking out the owner isn't the usual way of doing this, but on this occasion it worked just fine and the dog seems more than happy with his new master, who will come to appreciate the benefits. Who would have thought that trying to locate details of the birth parents of a woman living in New Zealand could be so difficult?

As well as reading the book I listened to an audio download (which I bought myself) narrated by Nicholas Bell. There was the odd mishit with names of places in the Leeds area, but that's me being very picky. Bell was a real pleasure to listen to and has an excellent range of voices, both male and female and I was never in any doubt as to which character was speaking. It was rather like listening to a play with added commentary. I'll return to both the book and the audio version again.

I'd like to thank the publishers for making the digital copy of the book available to me.

If you'd like to read more of Kate Atkinson, her debut was Behind the Scenes at the Museum. You could read the Jackson Brodie series in chronological order or as a standalone, but some of the references will make more sense if you've at least read When Will There Be Good News?

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson is the fourth in the crime mystery series about Jackson Brodie.

I'm a little obsessive about reading titles from a series in order. That means I've had a fantastic couple of weeks immersed in Jackson Brodie land. Highly highly recommended. Such great stories.

As usual Kate Atkinson doesn't disappoint the reader. I love how all the different stories finally link together at the send and as usual I can't guess the ending. Loved this book

Once again i would like to thank the Author Publishers and NetGalley for providing a kindle copy of this book to read and honestly review.
What a quality author Kate Atkinson is, this is yet another brilliant read from her, the fourth in the brilliant 'Jackson Brodie' series, however don't worry if you have not read any of the previous books, whilst there are some mentions of his previous cases its works perfectly as a standalone book. Though if you have not read the others WHY NOT. Well written as to be expected gripping from first to last page clever humorous witty, with superb characters this book is another gem.
Heartily recommended.

Another exciting read from Kate Atkinson. Jackson Brodie returns and we’re introduced to an array of seemingly unattached individuals – who all have a part to play in the story. It starts in the 1970s with a shocking discovery of a decomposing body, together with her (just alive) traumatised toddler son.

Moving forward to present day, Jackson is engaged to find out the birth parents of Hope Mc Master who now lives in NZ. He is also ‘sort-of’ looking for his fraudulent wife who conned him out of an inheritance and his married life. He has no idea of her true identity and tries to combine this with finding Hope’s origins. He has a nice relationship with a border terrier too!

Tilly the actress I felt particular empathy for – she’s in the first stages of dementia; is coping as best she can with the demands of modern society, her job, her homeshare and the results of having a lifelong disloyal friend who has affected her life immeasurably.

Tracey Waterhouse (who discovers the body at the beginning when a young PC), now a security guard is someone else you ‘root for’ - someone who does a ‘bad’ thing for a ‘good’ outcome. The lines between ’bad’ and good’ become fluid in this story for many of the characters.

Lots of dodgy 1970s police in this, with their endearing habits and work practices… Think ‘Life on Mars’ and then some. And some beautiful plays on words, as is usual with Kate - a delight to read.

The stories coil about each other as they drift together and everything starts to make sense. Not all loose ends are tied, however and you are left wanting to know more – especially about Tracy and Courtney.

As always Kate Atkinson never fails to deliver.

A Jackson Brodie novel that is written with humour and interest. But also such a good story that tugs at the heart but is also intriguing.

Looking forward to the latest.