Review of One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn is the follow up to Kate’s darkly amusing whodunit, Case Histories.
It features her laconic, world weary now ex-private eye, Jackson Brodie.

At the outset, we learn that Jackson is now living in comfort in the Pyrenees thanks to being left a load of loot by an old lady in Oxford. He is mostly happily involved with Julia who we also met in the last book. They are in Edinburgh where Jackson has agreed to finance a play that Julia’s company are putting on at the Festival Fringe.

The whole book seems to hinge on a road rage incident which features at the start of the story in which everyone in the book that matters is involved or is a witness. The story stems from here and follows four main strands.

The first strand is that of Martin, who is a writer of emasculated crime fiction a la Biggles style and seems to be making a success of it but hates it to bits. Throughout the book he seems to falling to pieces before our very eyes but at the end delivers the coup de grace which gives him eternal redemption.

The second strand is that of Grace Hatter, who is married to an unscrupulous builder who spends the whole book in intensive care while his wife muses on her life with him. This strand becomes boring very quickly but is important for reasons which I can’t divulge here. She feels too sorry for herself by far but is doing her best to spirit her dodgy husband’s money away.

The third strand features Louise, a police DS and single mother who struggles to make sense of the crimes in the story while worrying about her 14 year old son and aging moggy, Jellybean.

The fourth and most important strand features our erstwhile, reluctant hero, Jackson. He becomes involved in something he’s not sure about but because he’s bored out of his mind being a tourist in Edinburgh he decides to become a PI again and give an (illegal) helping hand to the police.

Throw in a dodge agency which hires out cleaners and call girls and a foul mouthed comic who thankfully gets killed very quickly and you have a very entertaining and interesting crime novel which keeps on trying to escape its milieu.

Very good stuff. Are there any more on the way, Kate?