Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When Will There Be Good News?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past
Appearances vs. Reality
Lies and Deceptions
Family
Summary
Analysis
Louise wakes up feeling as though she can’t breathe. She feels hungover and regrets last night’s red wine. She watches Patrick sleep and thinks about their docile lovemaking, wondering what it would be like with Jackson. She feels like a “very bad wife” for thinking this.
Louise is still hung up on memories of the previous day’s reunion with Jackson, even while she’s in bed next to a husband she knows is good for her. She again feels the strain of being a “bad wife” in a good marriage.
Themes
Louise gets up and drives to the Hunters’, rousing Neil Hunter at ten to seven with overbearing cheerfulness. When he lets her in, she asks for Joanna’s aunt’s contact information, since she hasn’t been able to reach Joanna. When Neil goes to look for it, Joanna hears a mobile ringing in a drawer. She can’t resist answering it. A cracked male voice asks, “Jo?” When Louise says “no,” the caller hangs up immediately. She puts it back and, when Neil returns, asks if she can have Joanna’s phone. Neil appears shocked—albeit unconvincingly, in Louise’s eyes—when Louise shows him the phone in the drawer.
As Louise typically does when she’s feeling insecure about her own life, she falls back on her obsessive cases. She finds Joanna’s abandoned mobile phone in the house, though it’s never clear who the mysterious male caller is—Andrew Decker? Neil, apparently pretending, claims he was unaware of the phone’s whereabouts.
Themes
Later, Louise is parked outside Alison Needler’s house, thinking about the elderly aunt. Some basic online research had revealed that Agnes Mason Barker had been an actress in her youth and married a BBC radio producer. But when Louise compares Joanna’s call history to the number of the aunt, there’ve been no calls between the two. When Joanna tries the number herself, she learns that Agnes Barker’s number was disconnected last week.
Louise thinks about Joanna while watching over the Needlers. She’s been won over to the idea, first planted by Reggie, that something may have happened to Joanna. In fact, the sick aunt—the excuse Neil gave for Joanna’s abrupt disappearance—doesn’t seem to have contacted Joanna recently.
Themes
Louise watches Alison Needler walk her children to school, then drives to Dr. Hunter’s surgery, feeling unable to stop moving. The surgery’s receptionist tells her that she hasn’t actually spoken to Joanna; Neil called to tell her about the sick aunt. In the maternity clinic, Sheila Hayes can’t tell her anything, either. But Sheila has seen the story about Joanna and the Mason murders in the paper.
Louise compulsively attends to her cases, perhaps afraid with being left alone with her thoughts. She asks around Joanna’s workplace and can’t find any additional clues.
Themes
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Back at the office, Louise redoubles her efforts to track down Joanna. Later, she returns to the Hunters’ and starts up Joanna’s Prius, which Neil claimed had been broken down. He jokes, “Do I need a lawyer?” Louise says, “I don’t know. Do you?”
It’s becoming ever clearer that there is some sort of dishonesty at work in the Hunter household. If Joanna didn’t drive her own car to her aunt’s in Yorkshire, then it’s not clear how she would have gotten there.
Themes
