One Good Turn: A Novel

In One Good Turn Jackson returns, following his girlfriend, Julia the actress, to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. He manages to fall into all kinds of trouble, starting with witnessing a brutal attack by "Honda Man" on another man stuck in a traffic jam. Is this road rage or something truly sinister? Another witness is Martin Canning, better known as Alex Blake, the writer. Martin is a shy, withdrawn, timid sort who, in a moment of unlikely action, flings a satchel at the attacker and spins him around, away from his victim. Gloria Hatter, wife of Graham, a millionaire property developer who is about to have all his secrets uncovered, is standing in a nearby queue with a friend when the attack takes place. There is nastiness afoot, and everyone is involved. Nothing is coincidental.

Through a labyrinthine plot which is hard to follow because the points of view are constantly changing, the real story is played out, complete with Russians, false and mistaken identities, dead bodies, betrayals, and all manner of violent encounters. Jackson gets pulled in to the investigation by Louise Monroe, a police detective and mother of an errant 14-year-old. There might be yet another novel to follow which will take up the connection those two forge in this book. Or, Jackson might just go back to France and feed apples to the local livestock.

Atkinson has written an enjoyable and lively story of no degrees of separation among the most unlikely cast of characters. Some plot lines have been left to drift, but it does hang together in a satisfying fashion. --Valerie Ryan

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

annoy-ing hyph-ens, 2008-11-15
i enjoyed this novel but was constantly distracted by the separation of words by hyphens. apparently the kindle formatting has a glitch with this bo-ok.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

silly, 2008-10-26
Having enjoyed the intricacy of Case Histories I was eager to read this -- but what a disappointment. It felt like she was so obsessed with adding more layers and more characters and more twists that she forgot they all had to make sense together. The silliest part: (spoilers) I suppose *one* ridiculous divine-intervention plot-altering death isn't out of place in a book calling itself a "jolly" murder mystery, so when the dog suddenly and without explanation ups and dies in mid-lunge at Jackson (as we discover after a chapter cliffhanger), I felt cheated but kept going. But when the perfectly healthy Russian prostitute trips, hits her head, and dies then and there -- oh, come on. That's for really mediocre fourth-rate noir films, not a novel from a writer who I *thought* was sharp and perceptive. You could just see her writing herself into a corner and forgetting she had a backspace-delete key. At first I'd been happy to hear there'd be a third Jackson Brodie -- but now not so much.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Boring, 2008-10-12
The first three quarters of this book just dragged on and on. The author talked about her characters in depth where she would focus so intensely and for such a long time on a character that you forgot exactly who the other characters were when she finally switched to the next. She also discussed different incidents numerous times with a different approach which got confusing. It was interesting how she connected the characters and the last quarter of the book was pretty good which makes me believe that if she had condensed this book it might have been good,


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

"Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds...", 2008-10-05
In the second of her Jackson Brodie series (after Case Histories: A Novel and before When Will There Be Good News?: A Novel), Kate Atkinson creates a series of bizarre characters, all involved with murder--either planning it, committing it, or trying to avoid it. Many seemingly unrelated characters, involved in several seemingly unrelated plot lines, make their appearance in the first fifty pages. During the four days in which the novel takes place, however, these characters and plots start to overlap and eventually come together, until, at the end, the reader is smiling with pleasure at the brilliant plotting and ironic twists of fate--full of admiration for Atkinson's skill in bringing it all together with such panache.

In the main plot line, an Edinburgh automobile accident leaves "Paul Bradley," a mysterious man and innocent victim, at the mercy of a crazed, baseball bat-wielding Honda driver. A witness, Martin Canning, the timid writer of Nina Riley mystery stories, reacts instinctively to the impending carnage, hurling his laptop at the Honda driver and saving "Paul Bradley" from certain death. A second set of characters revolves around Graham Hatter, the wealthy developer of Hatter Homes, who is in trouble for bribery, money laundering, and fraud in the building of cheap tract houses.

Jackson Brodie, former cop and private investigator (who features in three of Atkinson's novels), in Edinburgh for a drama festival in which his girlfriend is involved, introduces a third plot line when he discovers a woman's body on the rocks beside the ocean. It washes out to sea, nearly drowning him when he tries to retrieve it. Sgt. Louise Monroe, who lives in one of the Hatter Homes and whose son is a petty thief, is assigned to investigate the report of the body Brodie claims to have seen. Additional threads involve a housecleaning company/escort service, a second-rate comedian who "comes to dinner," and events which took place in Russia some years ago.

Full family backgrounds and work histories are given for all the characters, and it is through these that the reader often detects some of their interconnections. Ironies abound, and as characters' dreams are revealed and their fantasies are explored, the reader comes to know them--until Atkinson reveals even more surprises and shows how much we have yet to learn. Filled with devious plot twists, deliciously dark humor, and fast and furious action, Atkinson crafts a novel that proves one of Jackson Brodie's maxims: "A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." By the end of this novel, all the explanations have happened. Mary Whipple

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Emotionally Weird: A Novel
Not the End of the World




2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

This matryoshka is missing some dolls, 2008-06-02
If "One Good Turn" is approached as standard mystery fare, the reader will be disappointed. Kate Atkinson does not fashion her `mysteries' by following tried-and-true conventions, which can be a good thing if done well. (I'm not even sure this could be called a mystery.) In this novel, we are given a number of truly wacky characters that are thrown together in some sort of a melee, and then it's up to us to see if we can keep up with the meandering narrative that mostly shows how these people's lives intersect over a span of three days. That sort of six-degrees-of-separation thing is a tough trick to pull off, and it must have been tougher than I thought because the intersection of these lives hinges on a great number of coincidences. A few readers have mentioned the film "Crash," and that's a good comparison.

It's a unique read; these people are really odd and everything that happens to them is equally bizarre. A major portion of the book is dedicated to their back-stories and every now and then, there's a bit of action to create some suspense. It's really all about the characters--what they're thinking, what they're wishing, why they are who they are, etc. After a long time, one actually wonders if there's a plot hiding here somewhere. As it turns out, there is, but by then, it's no longer as pressing a need as it was earlier and even seemed like an afterthought. By the time it rolls around, I've lost interest. The author's use of the nested matryoshka dolls as metaphor for a multi-layered series of events, one revealing another, then another, so on, was wasted on a rather feeble story. I thought her prequel, "Case Histories," was exceptionally well done, but for me, "One Good Turn" doesn't compare favorably. So, three stars for shrewd characterization and a ton of genuinely hilarious paragraphs (that wry British humor gets me every time); the plot, on the other hand, was too little too late.

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