Product Description

Kate Atkinson's brilliant new novel, bringing back Jackson Brodie from the bestselling Case Histories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1653 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-16
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Harlan Coben
'Kate Atkinson is an absolute must read. I love everything she writes.'

Guardian
An absolute joy to read...Atkinson's wry, unvanquished characters, her swooping, savvy, sarcastic prose and authorial joie de vivre.'

Observer
'Very funny...Manages to be that rarest of things - a good literary novel and a cracking holiday read.'

Customer Reviews

I wish I cared
This was the most frustrating book I've read in years. I finished it because I'd enjoyed Case Histories and so kept thinking it would improve, but it didn't. The book starts with a good piece of action and then drifts into the characters' streams of consciousness. As most of the characters aren't particularly interesting or else are not believable, their consciousness is never more than an irritating diversion from the occasional page of plot. I wish I cared about them or what they did, but I didn't. Sometimes authors should take a year or two off to think rather than write something fast to please their publishers. Kate Atkinson can certainly do better.

Disappointing
Whilst accepting some degree of cleverness in creating the plot it relyed to an ridiculous extent on coincidence. It was also full of meandering dreams and memories of the main characters which were boring and unrelated to the plot. The ending also dragged on and was totally unsatisfying.

A Good Thing
I have just finished this book after several attempts of starting it and the short verdict is - I liked it but I didn't love it. Hence four stars. The reason is that for me the benchmark of Kate Atkinson's writing was Emotionally Wierd which I loved because of it's very wierdness. This is more like Case Histories so if you liked that then you will very probably enjoy this.

The main characters are very vivid and although they aren't particularly lovely there are a few I found myself routing for. Martin, the wimpy writer, gets plagued by "Cosmic Justice", Louise, the tough police officer who loves her cat more than her mother and Jackson Brodie, ex-everything who gets the closest to solving the mystery. By far the best character is Gloria (the dodgy builder's wife) and the funniest moments are Gloria's deadpan opinions on anything from her horrible children to her cheating husband.

The story gets off to a pretty slow start. Once you get past the slightly tedious retelling of "the incident" from the point of view of the main characters it rolls through quite cleverly, linking up seeming unconnected people, places and events.

Be warned, by the end there are a lot of infuriating loose ends and unanswered questions - things we can only guess at. Mostly to do with Gloria and if I were to tell you why it would spoil the book, so I won't. But I finished reading the last page and I just thought "Huh? How and when did she do that?".

Other reviewers haven't liked the writing style but for me that was one of my favourite parts of this book. There were a fair few self mocking literary references. I'm not keen on this sort of thing but it made sense in the setting. But it's a difficult thing to get all those train-of-thought tangents packed in and still have a story you can make sense of. It was easy to read and for me that is "A Good Thing". I really can't be bothered with prose that makes you're brain hurt, or language you need a dictionary to understand.

Reading back through this reveiw I don't feel as though I've done justice to One Good Turn. I enjoyed it and would recommend it. In fact I will probably read it again.