One Good Turn

I sought out Kate Atkinson's previous novel, Case Histories, after seeing Stephen King's Entertainment Weekly column mentioning the book as the best mystery he'd read in a decade. I loved it. I started reading it en route to a vacation in New York City, so engrossed that I had to finish the book before I could move on to any other activity. I recommended it to all of my fiction- and mystery-loving friends. So it was with great anticipation that I awaited One Good Turn. It was well worth the wait.

One Good Turn brings back former detective Jackson Brodie, two years after Case Histories left him wealthy, retired, settled in the French countryside-and bored. He comes to Edinburgh with his former client and sometimes girlfriend, Julia, an actress performing at the city's summer arts festival. His restless wandering around town is interrupted by a dramatic road rage incident that triggers a bizarre series of mysteries involving a man who seemingly doesn't exist, a disheartened crime writer, a greedy developer's wife, a washed-up comedian, a cynical female police inspector, a Russian maid, and an extremely large thug with a nasty dog and a baseball bat. Before long, Jackson has ceased being bored and is struggling to make sense of the improbable connections among this odd lot, as well as Julia's growing emotional distance.

Much like in Case Histories, the story here unfolds gradually and is punctuated by events both startling and subtle, from road rage to Russian tours, gunfire to book signings, car chases to festival theater productions. The book is dramatic and funny at varying turns:

(H)e had begun to wonder to himself (never to her, God forbid) why she called herself an actress when she hardly ever acted. When she thought she was about to lose this part at the last moment because of the lack of money, she had been plunged into a profound gloom that was so uncharacteristic of her that Jackson felt impelled to cheer her up. The play, Looking for the Equator in Greenland, was Czech (or maybe Slovakian, Jackson hadn't really been listening), an existentialist, abstract, impenetrable thing that was about neither the equator nor Greenland (nor indeed about looking for anything).

Atkinson brings each of her characters into full view for us, with a wonderfully languid style of storytelling. Take Martin, the crime novelist:

He didn't know if it was the same for everyone, did other people spend their time daydreaming about a better version of the everyday? No one ever talked about the life of the imagination, except in terms of some kind of Keatsian high art. No one mentioned the pleasure of picturing yourself sitting in a deck chair on a lawn, beneath a cloudless midsummer sky, contemplating the spread of a proper, old-fashioned afternoon tea, prepared by a cozy woman with a mature bosom and spotless apron who said things like, "Come on , now, eat up, ducks," because this was how cozy women with mature bosoms spoke in Martin's imagination....
Here's Gloria, the developer's wife:

Gloria was stoical in queues, irritated by people who complained and shuffled as if their impatience were in some way a mark of their individuality. Queuing was like life: you just shut up and got on with it.

We get to know the characters throughout the book in similar fashion, listening in on their thoughts, getting their points of view. By the end, readers know enough to care about what happens to everyone, even the bad guys (and their dogs).