One Good Turn is the second novel in which Kate Atkinson featured her private detective, Jackson Brodie. Brodie is attractive, compassionate and flawed. Appealing of course, with the added attraction that he loves dogs!
This novel is subtitled, ‘A jolly murder mystery’, a subtitle oddly at odds( seemingly) with the rather violent epsiodes glancingly featured in this multilayered narrative. As in her other Brodie novels, Atkinson is very adept at moving from one perspective to another, a technique exhilarating as much a heady!
Like being on a rather loopy ride through the mountains with an energetic, knowing driver very familiar with the road, but distractingly smoking a cheroot!
At times, the events become like those in a cartoon: vivid, swift and helter skelter.
‘Whatever else might have been said after that was never spoken because Graham’s golem chose that moment to put in the french windows with a baseball bat and pam started screaming as if she was trying to summon all the demons out of hell and she didn’t stop screaming until the stranger appeared in the garden an shot the golem in the heart.’
Here we know we are seeing a scene from the point of view of at least one character utterly bemused by the sheer brutal ity and absurdity of the events. ‘Golem’ ‘ is the term chosen to describe the killer we readers have come to know as the ‘honda man’. Now he is seen from another perspective and he is the golem. Some creature out of myth; destructive, crazed and vindictive. Yet, there is also a sense of thankfulness here.
Myths feature evil, but they also feature the good. The unlikely knight who rescues women. Here, Martin, the dull writer of tame, fatuous thrillers, finally gets to become the hero. Relief and composure return. Disparate threads of this helter skelter story are becoming joined. Stability will return.
Highly entertaining and once you are hooked…fabulous!