The melancholy private detective is back for a tale of sordid crimes on the Yorkshire coast, with a sprinkle of postmodernism ...It takes its time to get going. There’s an excellently sinister opening – in a sort of pre-credits sequence... Atkinson roasts the old chestnut of “the banality of evil” by introducing us to evildoers in the round: their small vanities, their pragmatism, their affection for their families and loyalty to their friends....The narrative circles in its own time around the relationships and disappointments of its characters, but connections start to proliferate and secrets start to emerge.....There’s considerable vamping about with tone in Big Sky. The novel enjoys the absurdities of its genre – winks at them, even – yet manages at the same time to do a lot of work with the melancholy and absurdity of ordinary life. ...It’s a credit to Atkinson’s dexterity that despite these clashes of tone and register the novel manages to hang together, even though the subject matter – child sexual abuse, human trafficking – and the essentially comic mechanisms of the plot, its coincidences and confrontations, seem to be at odds. How seriously are we to take it all? Atkinson artfully avoids supplying or implying an answer.