When Will There Be Good News? follows four characters with intersecting storylines. Joanna Hunter is a doctor who was her family's lone survivor of a massacre thirty years before. She disappears when the murderer is scheduled to be released from prison. Reggie Chase is a 16-year-old orphan who is the nanny to Joanna's infant. Jackson Brodie (a retired detective from Kate Atkinson's earlier novels,
Case Histories and
One Good Turn) survives a train wreck and policewoman Louise Monroe struggles with an unhappy marriage.
When Will There Be Good News? has received mostly positive reviews with The Independent saying, "The fast pace, while exhilarating, is never exhausting. As in the best crime fiction, dramatic events and unexpected twists abound, but Atkinson subverts the genre by refusing to neatly tie up every thread. And while there is plenty of blood and bitterness, redemption and resolve are well represented too. Good news all round."
