One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

[marias]

This book is like the movies Crash, Babel, and the better indie - Hawaii, Oslo. The characters continue to intersect which drives the story. Most of the characters are on the scene at the beginnning for a car wreck. The people that try and help others end up having bad things happen to them. There is sort of a murder mystery that drives the plot.

My favorite part of the book is the characters. They all seem likeable (except the bad guys and you are given plenty of reasons not to like them). There is a character, Jackson Brodie that is a retired detective from a previous novel. What makes the characters sympathetic to me is that they have so many jerks on their lives. Jerk spouses, parents, children, hangers-on, employers, etc.

A complaint I have is that the author tended to go on too much about details of just about every person, leaving the book short on plot. This might have been more intereting if I had been in Scotland lately. The setting is Edinburgh and it really gives you a good glimpse into modern UK life. However, there are a lot of references I didn't get, which made reading tedious.

The only other thing I didn't like was that the book had the f-word and other curse words on about every other page. I thought it was overdone for my taste. But, hey, now I know how they swear in Scotland.

I give the book 3 &1/2 stars. This is a very clever book.