Scottish culture on the skids

"One Good Turn"
By Kate Atkinson

Some years ago, I spent a summer in the lovely city of Edinburgh, Scotland, working illegally at a lousy tourist-oriented cafe and going to as many performances as I could in the city's annual theatrical Festival. There were lots of people in town for the Festival, some of them performers, some of them theater-buffs, many of them hangers-on, like me.

Anyway, I was looking for a light, summer-reading kind of book and picked up this new Edinburgh-set thriller by the Edinburgh-based author of "Case Histories" and it is so evocative of that city and the Festival that I can almost taste the chemicals in the so-called cappucino we served in that tourist cafe.

Like "Case Histories," "One Good Turn" switches points of view from one chapter to the next, telling a series of stories that end up interlocking, And, as in "Case Histories," the central character is Jackson Brodie, an ex-military, ex-police private investigator, who must unravel the novel's central mystery. In "Case Histories," Atkinson's second novel but first thriller, the literary construct was so strong that I was halfway through the novel before I realized it was going to be essentially the kind of detective story that you might see as a British-made TV mini-series on PBS. And the characters may have been well-developed, but they still fit too neatly into the kinds of type you might see in the same TV shows.
"One Good Turn" has the same trouble, but more so: It doesn't take much time at all to see that it's a work of genre fiction. There's the kind of book that tests the limits of credulity, and then there's the kind of book that exists beyond the limits of credulity, and that's where "One Good Turn" sits. In his first 24 hours in Edinburgh, Brodie witnesses an incident of road rage, discovers a dead body, and is attacked by a man with a baseball bat and a dog who lunges for Brodie ... only to suddenly die of a heart inches away from him. Only a fan who has already surrendered all disbelief could accept all that. Atkinson clearly realizes this: She has characters tease Brodie about his bad luck. She also clearly realizes this teasing is not good enough: Another character is the author of a series of mediocre crime novels.

This not to say that "One Good Turn" is bad. It's pretty good for a thriller. The action is compelling, and the Edinburgh setting steals the show without coming across like a tourist brochure. But the coincidences and improbable turns will have you saying, "Oh, come on!" as you keep turning the pages.

Incidentally, "One Good Turn" echoes Ian McEwan's much more ambitious "Saturday," in that the action centers on an incident of road rage following a fender-bender with a Really Bad Dude. In Atkinson's case, both drivers are Really Bad Dudes.