One Good Turn

Kate Atkinson made it into the top tier of contemporary literature on her very first try: her debut novel “The Museum of My Terrors” won the prestigious Whitbread Prize, beating Salman Rushdie’s “The Last Sigh of the Moor.” And her series of novels about private detective Jackson Brodie, which has also won over Russian readers (“Crimes of the Past,” “Turn Out for the Better,” “Waiting for Good News?,” “Just Before Dawn, with the Dog—Together,” “Big Sky”), Stephen King called “the main detective project of the decade.” The total print run of the series has exceeded three million copies, and based on the first books, the BBC produced the TV series “Crimes of the Past” starring Jackson Izex.

This time the action takes place in Scotland’s capital, teeming with tourists during the famous annual Edinburgh Festival of Arts. Once again, Jackson Brodie witnesses episodes that seem to have nothing to do with one another: a prominent businessman—under full investigation by the department of economic crimes—ends up in the hospital with a heart attack under highly compromising circumstances; ebb tide leaves a girl’s body on the shore wearing cross-shaped earrings, but the incoming tide carries it back out to sea, despite Brodie’s best efforts to be nearby at the time. The local police see him, at best, as a liar—or even as a suspect...