Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn (A Jolly Murder Mystery), has been sitting deep in my bedside pile for more than a year (possibly two). It is, as it claims, a jolly murder mystery, with what, for the individual characters, feels like unlikely co-incidence after co-incidence, but is for the reader a slowly building chaos, the result of the lifestyle and criminal choices of one man. There are hilarious scenes, a sense of real life and events (Russian brides, cheap labour, fringe comedy, theatre and circuses in Edinburgh, novelists as real people). One of the funniest moments is when an intellectually challenged heavy finds himself in the same place as most of the people he’d like to kill and is spoilt for choice. The last line is brilliant and yet fitting.

A jolly good read!