Berk Worms Book Club: Murder Mystery

Welcome to the Berk Worms Book Club🐛 2025. Each month we all read the same book that we have chosen from a particular genre and then meet to discuss it as well as other books we are reading.

For July, 2025, we have chosen to read a book from the Murder Mystery genre. Our chosen novel is written by Kate Atkinson and is entitled ‘Death at the Sign of the Rook’. This novel is part of the hugely successful Jackson Brodie series which was adapted for television in 2011 by the BBC and called ‘Case Histories’. This newest addition ( 6th novel featuring Jackson Brodie) was published in August 2024 and runs at approximately 324 pages. It is available in all formats, including Kindle and Audible. It can also be picked up at the local library if you get in quickly!

About the Novel:

Welcome to Rook Hall. The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.

Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting.

But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family.

Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends.

As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.

About the author:

Kate Atkinson is an international bestselling novelist, as well as playwright and short story writer. She is the author of Life After Life; Transcription; Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a Whitbread Book of the Year winner; the story collection Not the End of the World; and five previous novels in the Jackson Brodie crime series, which was adapted into the BBC TV show Case Histories.

Critical views:

‘Sharp, droll and knowing as ever, Atkinson has huge fun with the set-up; the supporting cast is terrific, and the rueful Brodie, ever more mindful of the passing years, feels like an old friend.' Guardian

‘Delicious character studies… fine writing, wit, originality and eccentricity – even as it induces a warm glow’ Telegraph

Reading ahead with the BERKWORMS

12 August: we are reading a Booker Prize Winner to be selected in June Meet Up

9 September: we are reading a Dystopian novel to be selected in our July meet up.

Happy reading, 🐛Cazza