One Good Turn: A Jolly Murder Mystery by Kate Atkinson

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 Publisher)

Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the critically acclaimed novels Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird. Her most recent bestseller, Case Histories, introduced the character Jackson Brodie and and won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster