One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Atkinson uses the same story telling technique that worked so well in Case Histories - several mysteries unravel at the same time with characters slowing crossing from one to other until it's all brought together in the end. However, in Case Histories, each mystery stood on its own merit. In this book, I felt like the characters were supposed to be the story, and the crimes that brought them together were padding. Excessive, smothering, too heavy padding that would have been okay on an episode of "Midsommer Murders" (which Atkinson dares to mock, along with every other cliché about writers and fans of writers, apparently not seeing that she's one of them), but is cumbersome in a book with this many twists. As for the characters, there was not one character arc in this book that I'd didn't figure out by the middle of the book. Yes, there was some development, but it wasn't surprising in the least bit. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a great setting for this kind of story, though, and that along with Jackson Brody's negative attitude about just about everything is what kept me reading this book.



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