One Good Turn

On a beautiful summer day, crowds lined up outside a theater witness a sudden act of extreme road rage: a tap on a fender triggers a nearly homicidal attack. Jackson Brodie, ex-cop, ex-private detective, new millionaire, is among the bystanders.

The event thrusts Jackson into the orbit of the wife of an unscrupulous real estate tycoon, a washed-up comedian, a successful crime novelist, a mysterious Russian woman, and a female police detective. Each of them hiding a secret, each looking for love or money or redemption or escape, they all play a role in driving Jackson out of retirement and into the middle of several mysteries that intersect in one sinister scheme.

Kate Atkinson "writes such fluid, sparkling prose that an ingenious plot almost seems too much to ask, but we get it anyway," writes Laura Miller for Salon. With a keen eye for the excesses of modern life, a warm understanding of the frailties of the human heart, and a genius for plots that turn and twist, Atkinson has written a novel that delights and surprises from the first page to the last.

The book features numerous examples of student texts and teacher commentary, as well as figures and appendices that summarize research findings and present sample lessons and other teaching materials. It is thus simultaneously comprehensive in its approach to the existing research and highly practical in showing current and future teachers how this material applies to their everyday endeavors of responding to student writing and teaching composition classes.

Response to student writing--whether it takes the form of teachers' written feedback on content, error correction, teacher-student conferences, or peer response--is an extremely important component of teaching second language writing. Probably no single activity takes more teacher time and energy. Response to Student Writing is a valuable theoretical and practical resource for those involved in this crucial work, including L2 composition researchers, in-service and preservice teachers of ESOL/EFL writers, and teacher educators preparing graduate students for the teaching of writing.

Two years after the events of Case Histories left him a retired millionaire, former detective Jackson Brodie has followed Julia, his occasional girlfriend and former client, to Edinburgh for its famous summer arts festival. But when he watches a man brutally attacked in a traffic jam — the apparent victim of an extreme case of road rage — a chain of events is set in motion that will pull the wife of an unscrupulous real estate tycoon, a timid but successful crime novelist, and a hardheaded female police detective into Jackson's orbit. Suddenly out of retirement, Brodie is once again in the midst of several mysteries that intersect in one giant and sinister scheme.

A triumphant novel filled with wit and surprise and intrigue, One Good Turn will delight the many fans who applauded Kate Atkinson's first foray into thrillers, and it will win her even more devoted readers as she continues to blur the boundaries that divide literary and crime fiction.