What: In the midst of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, there's a small road accident that leads to a frightening case of road rage. Events in One Good Turn spiral from there, taking into their scope a successful novelist, the wife of a corrupt real estate tycoon, a washed-up comic, a police detective, a mysterious Russian woman, and ex-PI Jackson Brodie. This is not one mystery --- it's several intersecting mysteries. With one extremely well-executed payoff.
Comparable to: Like Deborah Crombie, Atkinson has a knack for picking up peripheral characters and placing them full-on in the dangerous trajectory of her story. Some of them don't make it to the end of this book, but some of them get carried on through to the next.
Representative quote: "Even Martin had wondered at first if it was another show --- a faux-impromptu piece intended either to shock or to reveal our immunity to being shocked because we lived in a global media community where we had become passive voyeurs of violence (and so on). That was the line of thought running through the detached, intellectual part of his brain. His primitive brain, on the other hand, was thinking, Oh fuck, this is horrible, really horrible, please make the bad man go away."
You might not like it if: You don't want to keep track of the different mysteries. You want one mystery, with one plot.
How to get it: Please look at the picture at the top of this post and take a moment to appreciate the wonderful title/cover pairing of this edition (2006 U.S. hardcover). Don't you want that?
Connection to previous Wreckage: Atkinson introduced Jackson Brodie to the world in Case Histories, which was Rec. #3.
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