One Good Turn

At Sea in an Edinburgh of Daydreams and Traffic

The characters in Kate Atkinson’s new book, “One Good Turn,” are a wee bit out of place in Edinburgh, where the story unfolds. They are all interestingly off-balance. And Ms. Atkinson enjoys keeping them that way, much as she delights in playing sly little tricks on the reader. The events in “One Good Turn” are simple, but they only seem straightforward. They don’t fully make sense until the author chooses to connect them.

Readers of Ms. Atkinson’s previous book, “Case Histories,” know just how adept she is at manipulating multiple story lines, keeping them separate and cryptic. So it comes as no surprise when “One Good Turn” starts out with an inexplicable fit of fury. In the midst of the Edinburgh International Festival, two cars bump in traffic and trigger an incident of road rage. A man calling himself Paul Bradley is attacked by a furious stranger wielding a baseball bat. All we know about Bradley is this: When the authorities arrive at the crime scene, it’s the first time in his life that he is happy to see the police.

One witness to this strange behavior (“Viking berserkers come to mind”) is Jackson Brodie, the detective at the center of “Case Histories.” Jackson was in Cambridge, England, during that story, but a few things have changed. He inherited money from one of the earlier book’s characters. He stopped working and moved to France, where he remains rich, guilty and out of touch.

Jackson has also remained involved with Julia, another character from the earlier book, an actress appearing in a fringe theater production that is part of the Edinburgh festival. “It was like watching the inmates of an old-fashioned asylum,” Jackson thinks, as he watches Julia’s company on the stage.

Another witness to the fight is Martin Canning, a timid writer and this book’s most enjoyable invention. Martin makes a fine comic alter ego for Ms. Atkinson. He writes a highly successful mystery series quaintly set in the 1940’s, with a plucky young heroine named Nina Riley. Among Nina’s preposterous feats have been retrieving a stolen racehorse, thwarting the kidnapping of the infant Prince Charles and foiling a plot to steal the Scottish crown jewels.

Martin’s dealings with his editor are particularly amusing, since he suspects she may not have his best interests at heart. He has been advised to publish these books under the pseudonym Alex Blake. This is “ ‘a strong, no-nonsense sort of name,’ his editor said, ‘to compensate.’ For what, she didn’t say.”

With Jackson an uneasy tourist and Martin desperately uncomfortable in his own skin, Ms. Atkinson complicates her story with other interlopers. One is an unfunny stand-up comic who is performing at the festival and gives out photos and recordings of himself as treats. Another, right up there with Martin in terms of entertainment value, is a wealthy matron named Gloria Hatter, whose husband, Graham, is a crooked real estate developer. “Caveat emptor, Gloria,” Graham once said. “It’s the only Latin I’ve ever needed to know.”

Since Ms. Atkinson is not strictly a mystery writer, and since she relishes the process of developing this assortment of characters, “One Good Turn” does some dawdling. Too much perhaps. “Case Histories” was a tighter book, though it too spent its fair share of time musing about small matters. This time Ms. Atkinson incorporates a good deal of the family histories of the characters, and some have similar backgrounds. The principals have all had trouble with a parent figure (in Gloria’s case, a father-in-law who drowned a basket of kittens). This residue of trauma colors the way they behave today.

And each of these characters lives an imaginary life as well as a real one. In Gloria’s daydreams, for instance, Graham is dead, and she is airing out the marital mattress, marveling at her husband’s inability to understand the most important gift she ever gave him. It was a copy of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” and he took it to be a simple tribute to the accomplishments of a great and mighty ruler. Gloria was more interested in the ruler’s hollow boasts and ultimate destruction. “One Good Turn” is a book that merrily gives her the last laugh.

Midway through, the plotting starts to click, and Ms. Atkinson is ready to let the “aha!” moments take over. It’s suddenly clear what a single mother named Louise has to do with the rest of the characters, and what the story’s crew of Russian crooks is actually up to. “They out-Grahamed Graham,” Gloria thinks about some garish Russian gangsters, “which was quite an achievement.”

In the past Ms. Atkinson has played the minor time trick of letting events almost converge and then replaying them from slightly different points of view. She does that here to the same smart, unnerving effect. And she frequently brings up the image of Russian dolls, each hidden inside another, to illustrate how her storytelling tactics work.

By the apt ending of “One Good Turn” a whole series of these dolls has been opened. In the process the book has borne out one of Jackson’s favorite maxims: “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”