Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78222 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 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

Emotionally thin
What a disappointment after Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, where Jackson Brodie made his appearance. Case Histories had the thrill of the quest and the art of detection, played out by emotionally weird yet disturbingly real families and individuals. It was quite outside genre.

One Good Turn takes place in Iain Rankin land but really, are any of the characters even as believable as Rankin's "Big Mo" Rafferty? Brodie's character seems to be slipping into the background; the hero Martin Canning is not quite believable and not quite interesting either. Rankin, le Carre and Eric Ambler can do the innocent caught up in horrible events; Atkinson evidently can't, though like most reviewers I did read the book to the end, and quite fast too.

No coincidence, surely, that in the novel Canning is being hectored by a publisher's editor to churn out fast-selling, mediocre thrillers.

Finally, I can live without English authors "doing" Edinburgh with a surfeit of name dropping and nonsense (maybe in another of her books) about "presbyterian genes".

What Grows From One Incident
A road rage incident is witnessed by a queue of people outside a lunchtime show at the Edinburgh Festival. The novel weaves together the seemingly disparate stories of some of the witnesses, all increasingly interlinking as the narrative unfolds.
The characters themselves at first, each in their seemingly disjointed and episodic narratives, all seem like typical thriller stereotypes. There is the wife of an unscrupulous and unfaithful property developer, a wimpish crime writer, a single-mother policewoman with a son on the verge of villainy, and Jackson Brodie: ex-army, ex-police, ex-private-eye and - at first - almost a walking cliché.
However, Atkinson, with deft touches of characterisation, breathes life and credibility into these various characters and weaves together the stories wittily and masterfully, akin to the set of nested Russian dolls that feature in the narrative. Atkinson creates a novel here that succeeds both as a thriller and as a study of character through emotional drama that would put many a so-called `literary novel' to shame.

Not a patch on Case Histories
Case Histories was marvellous and original and I'd recommend it to anyone. This, however, is not a great follow up and I, for one, hope Atkinson moves on to something entirely new sooner rather than later. She is such a fine writer.