One Good Turn

Having so much loved Case Histories I couldn't wait to get my hands on this, the second in the series. How clever of Kate Atkinson to have reinvented herself as a crime novelist. And, though I gather some readers have not enjoyed this one as much as the first, I liked it a lot. In fact I only have one real complaint -- these books are so attractive and entertaining that you are in danger of getting through them too fast. I took this on a trip to London and had to ration myself strictly in order to keep something to read on the train home.
I always think it must be a terrific challenge for a crime writer to handle the implications of a series featuring the same characters. You have to allow both for readers who haven't read the earlier books and for those who have. The characters who reappear here are the wonderful Jackson Brodie, retired policeman, now retired private detective, and Julia, his actress girlfriend. Kate Atkinson manages well with this, I thought -- enough information is imparted to satisfy people who may be wondering what happened to some of the characters in the last novel, but not so much that new readers would be confused by it.
Case Histories ended on an almost impossibly fairy-tale note, with Jackson not only getting the girl but also inheriting millions from an aged eccentric client and able finally to live his dream -- a gorgeous house in South West France complete with large sparkling swimming pool. But impossibly turns out to be the operative word here. Cracks are starting to appear in Jackson and Julia's relationship, and the house in France, delightful though it is, does not appear to offer quite as fulfilling a life as Jackson had hoped. In any case, this novel finds them in Edinburgh for the Festival, where Julia is appearing in an appalling-sounding Fringe show while Jackson mooches around, getting himself into various kinds of appalling trouble. He witnesses a road-rage attack and gets suspected for inciting it, finds a dead girl in the sea but loses the body and is suspected of inventing the whole thing, is attacked in a dark alley by a psychopath with a baseball bat whose dog dies of a heart attack as it is leaping for Jackson's throat, and is accused of killing the dog... and so on, almost ad infinitum. All of this brings him into contact with an attractive, wary policewoman, Louise Monroe, to whom he finds himself attracted ("bad Jackson", he keeps telling himself) despite his increasingly desperate attachment to the increasingly cool Julia.
There is a most wonderful cast of characters here -- Martin Canning, the quiet, insecure writer of (very) soft detective fiction, who gets drawn into an extraordinary series of events involving mobsters, guns and drugs as a result of hurling his laptop case at the road-rage attacker -- Gloria Hatter, wife of the crooked property developer Graham Hatter, whose death she has been so much longing for that she tells no-one that he has ended up in hospital in a coma following an encounter with a call-girl in a motel -- Tatiana, that same call-girl, who comes into Gloria's life and changes it in many important ways -- Richard Moat, the dreadful stand-up comic who has inveigled his way into Martin's house and makes use of his car and his £10,000 Rolex watch. But above all the great joy of the novel is Jackson, gloomily wading through everything that Edinburgh throws at him, worrying about the state of the world and what effect it will have on the future of his lovely ten-year-old daughter, longing for the sort of happy, stable relationship that he realises increasingly that Julia is not prepared to settle for.
Well! A novel that manages to be funny, sad and exciting, all at the same time. I can't wait for the third in the series, due out in August.