Kate Atkinson’s novels are always challenging, but the rewards for careful attention are many. Her 2013 novel, LIFE AFTER LIFE, flummoxed not a few fans with its fantastic, start-and-stop narrative of a family in wartime England. TRANSCRIPTION shares this setting, but none of the characters. And while readers must still keep their wits about them, this smart, tantalizing mystery makes definitive sense in the end.

There are only three time periods --- not many for Atkinson! We begin with a few pages of 1981, when 60-year-old Juliet Armstrong is being attended to by paramedics after being hit by a car. Shift to 1950, and Juliet is working at the BBC, living alone. Her boss, Mr. Prendergast, finds her very cynical for one so young. “Older men of a certain type were drawn to her. They seemed to want to improve her in some way. Juliet was almost thirty and didn’t feel she needed much more improvement. The war had seen to that.”

"...[a] smart, tantalizing mystery... Whoever said 'the plot thickens' has described this absorbing novel to a T."

One day, Juliet spies a man she worked with back in the war, when she was a typist for MI5. She rushes after him, calling his name, “Mr. Toby!” He glances at her and hurries on his way without a word. Soon she receives a cryptic message, delivered to her at work: “You will pay for what you did.” Atkinson expertly teases us toward something shocking that Juliet was party to in the war. “The pearls at her neck were not Juliet’s; she had taken them from the body of a dead woman.” Is this the deed (which we don’t fully learn about until two-thirds of the way through the novel) that is coming home to roost?

After getting thoroughly enmeshed in Juliet’s life as a BBC producer, the action shifts back to 1940. Young Juliet has lost her beloved mother to cancer and has no other family. Having gone to secretarial school, she is hired by the Security Service. Several months later, she is plucked out of the Registry for a special project. She is introduced to Godfrey Toby, an experienced spy who is posing as a German agent for the purposes of getting information from English fifth columnists --- those who support the German side in the war. Juliet types up the tape recordings from their assignations, which take place in the apartment next door to where she works. Soon she is conscripted into assuming her own spy identity, in order to draw certain society figures into the trap.

Back in 1950, things get hotter for Juliet as she realizes that she is being followed. “The war was a clumsily stitched wound and it felt as if it was being opened by something. Or someone. Was it Godfrey Toby? I must find him, she thought…. I will be the hunter, not the hunted.” We go along for the ride as she sets about tracking down all the people from her war past who might be wanting her to pay.

1940, 1950 and finally back to 1981 --- we move with Juliet, peeling back layers and meeting some memorable characters along the way: Peregrine Gibbons, who asks her to marry him but will not kiss her; Hartley, who is always drunk but knows everyone and can find out anything; and Cyril, the young technician who records the German sympathizers with Godfrey Toby. Juliet, with her intelligence and stubborn, sardonic cynicism, is a winning protagonist. Whoever said “the plot thickens” has described this absorbing novel to a T.