When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3)

by Kate Atkinson

“What’s Dr. Hunter like?” she asked Reggie Chase on the drive to Musselburgh, and the girl said, “Well . . .” It seemed Joanna Hunter liked Chopin and Beth Nielsen Chapman and Emily Dickinson and Henry James and had a remarkable tolerance for the Tweenies. She could play the piano—“really well,” according to Reggie—and agreed with William Morris that you should have nothing in your house that you didn’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. She loved coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon and had a surprisingly sweet tooth and said that it was a medical fact that you had a separate “pudding stomach,” which was why when you’d eaten a big meal you could always “find room for dessert.” She didn’t believe in God, her favorite book was Little Women because it was about “girls and women discovering their strengths,” and her favorite film was La Règle du Jeu, which she had lent Reggie a copy of and which Reggie liked a lot, although not as much as The Railway Children, which was her favorite film. If Dr. Hunter had to rescue three things from a burning building, they would be the baby and the dog but Reggie hadn’t been sure what the third thing would be—Louise suggested Mr. Hunter but Reggie said she thought he would probably manage to rescue himself. Of course, if Reggie was in the building, then Dr. Hunter would rescue her, Reggie said. And she loved the baby. Gabriel—of course, Gabriel, Gabrielle. The baby was named for Joanna Hunter’s dead mother.