Book Summary and Reviews of One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn

A Novel

by Kate Atkinson

  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Oct 2006, 418 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

On a beautiful summer day, crowds lined up outside a theater witness a sudden act of extreme road rage: a tap on a fender triggers a nearly homicidal attack.

Jackson Brodie, ex-cop, ex-private detective, new millionaire, is among the bystanders.

The event thrusts Jackson into the orbit of the wife of an unscrupulous real estate tycoon, a washed-up comedian, a successful crime novelist, a mysterious Russian woman, and a female police detective. Each of them hiding a secret, each looking for love or money or redemption or escape, they all play a role in driving Jackson out of retirement and into the middle of several mysteries that intersect in one sinister scheme.

Kate Atkinson "writes such fluid, sparkling prose that an ingenious plot almost seems too much to ask, but we get it anyway," writes Laura Miller for Salon. With a keen eye for the excesses of modern life, a warm understanding of the frailties of the human heart, and a genius for plots that turn and twist, Atkinson has written a novel that delights and surprises from the first page to the last.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Atkinson's voice rings on every page, and her sly and wry observations move the plot as swiftly as suspense turns the pages of a thriller." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Atkinson is a restrained, perceptive writer skilled at telling stories from multiple and hugely diverse points of view... Her prose is piercing, lucid and perceptive." —USA Today

This information about One Good Turn was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, was named England's Whitbread Book of the Year in 1996. Since then, she has written eleven more ground-breaking, bestselling books. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Read-Alikes

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