Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

By the time Jackson was thirteen his mother was already dead of cancer, his sister had been murdered, and his brother had killed himself, helpfully leaving his body -- hanging from the light fixture -- for Jackson to find when he came home from school.  Jackson never got the chance to be selfish, to sprawl and make demands and fold his arms sarcastically.  And anyway, if he had, his father would have given him a good skelping.  Not that Jackson wished suffering on his son --God forbid -- but a little less narcissism wouldn't go amiss.
Kate Atkinson, Big Sky:  Little, Brown and Company,2019

Welcome back Jackson Brodie. This is Atkinson's fifth novel about private detective Brodie, and the first since 2010 (It would be helpful, but not necessary, to read the earlier ones first).   In between Brodie novels she has written novels that experiment with narrative conventions and she has gradually introduced those experiments into the Brodie novels.  Actually Brodie in Big Sky is only one of the many characters, including a group of golf buddies and their families, with the golfers running a sex trafficking ring.  And almost every character hears, in parentheses, someone in their head "talking" to them.  Brodie hears his former lover, Julia, while trying to take care of their teenage son Nathan and their dog Dido, Queen of Carthage.

There's a great deal to keep track of in this multi-layered novel, more a novel of human relationships than a strictly crime or private detective novel (what little detecting Brodie does -- mostly divorce work --leads him into trouble and is mostly unsuccessful), especially the relationships between spouses, between parents and children and between siblings and half-siblings.  Atkinson takes us in directions that lead to dead-ends and red herrings in strange parts of the East Coast of Yorkshire, where Brodie is now living, before the crimes are revealed, just as Laurence Stern and Tobias Smollett did.

Truth, in Jackson's experience, was often found skulking behind the lines. Sometimes, of course, that could be preferable to it charging you from the front with a bayonet.