One Good Turn
Kate Atkinson, 2006
Little, Brown & Co.
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316012829
Summary
It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident — a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved: the wife of an unscrupulous property developer, a crime writer, a washed-up comedian. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander — until he becomes a murder suspect.
Stephen King called Case Histories the best mystery of the decade: One Good Turn sees the return of its irresistible hero Jackson Brodie. As the body count mounts, each character's story contains a kernel of the next, like a set of nesting Russian dolls. Everyone in the teeming Dickensian cast is looking for love or money or redemption or escape: but what each actually discovers is their own true self. (From the publisher.)
This is the second in the Jackson Brodie series, following Case Histories. The third in the series is When Will There Be Good News.