One Good Turn

A Novel

Paperback, 448 pages

English language

Published Sept. 10, 2007 by Back Bay Books.

ISBN:
978-0-316-01282-9
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
154694484

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4 stars (12 reviews)

Awards BCA Crime Thriller of the Year Best Novel (nominee)

It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident - an incident which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander - until he becomes a suspect. With "Case Histories", Kate Atkinson showed how brilliantly she could explore the crime genre and make it her own. In "One Good Turn", she takes her masterful plotting one step further. Like a set of Russian dolls, each thread of the narrative reveals itself to be related to the last. Her Dickensian cast of characters are all looking for love or money and find it in surprising places. As ever with Atkinson what each one actually discovers is their true self. Unputdownable and triumphant, "One Good Turn" is a sharply intelligent read that is also …

13 editions

Review of 'One good turn' on 'LibraryThing'

4 stars

Not as compelling as her first Jackson Brodie book, Case Histories, which was simliar in that, instead of telling a straightforward story, various characters cross each other's paths and, as they intersect, you begin to see a pattern. Here Jackson is in Edinburgh where his female companion is in a Fringe event and he witnesses a fender bender thatreturnturns into a road rage incident, out of which spiral several, ultimately connected plot threads, some of them featuring deeply annoying characters. "Astonishing things happen all the time" Jackson says to another character. "We just don't notice." That's sort of the motto of the book.

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Subjects

  • English Mystery & Suspense Fiction
  • Fiction
  • Fiction - General
  • Mystery/Suspense
  • Mystery & Detective - General
  • Fiction / General
  • Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths
  • Suspense