One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

I have generally loved everything Kate Atkinson has written, except for Emotionally Weird, which gave me the familiar but unwelcome sensation of reading something while I was on drugs, under water. (I've felt that way once before, while reading Banana Yoshimoto's Amrita.)

This book features retired detective Jackson Brodie, who while attending the Edinburgh Arts Festival finds himself in the crossroads of a bunch of characters who at face value don't have anything in common: a mystery writer who is much milder and meeker in real life than his profession would suggest; a single-mom detective; a 60ish housewife married to a real-estate tycoon. There are others but these are the most important and most developed.

While horrible things keep happening to some characters, there is also a good deal of comic relief in the book. Kate Atkinson writes the humor in so subtly though that you never feel she's mocking any of the characters; she's simply narrating their real lives, in all their comedy and tragedy.

The good guys are generally rewarded with happy endings (or perhaps the promise of a happy ending in the near future), and the bad guys are given their just ends.

Jackson Brodie appeared in Kate's last book and I got the sense that more of his exploits will be narrated in future.

The one element I wasn't so keen was what seemed to me Kate's use of deus ex machina in the form of a Russian girl. I feel that her role in the book keeps this from being a genuine mystery. But then again I can also see her usefulness in both tying up loose ends and poking fun at the genre of mystery, so maybe KA intended her to play this role after all.