I have been a Kate Atkinson fan since her very first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and found her Jackson Brodie ‘crime novels’ intriguing and different. I thought they were going to be a trilogy, so it was a surprise to find this new Jackson Brodie novel, all 494 pages of it, featured in the bookshop.

Jackson Brodie is back in his native Yorkshire, behaving like a tourist and recalling those wives and partners of the past that we have already encountered. He rescues a dog that is being maltreated. Meanwhile, in a parallel incident, Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective who is working in security in the Leeds Merrion Centre, ‘rescues’ a maltreated child, Courtney, by ‘buying’ her from a skinny prostitute, Kelly Cross.

We are led through a clutter of memories – of the Yorkshire ripper, of disappearing children, of a murdered prostitute and of an inexplicable adoption where no papers or records surface – so that for the readers, the central issue is as clouded as it is for Jackson Brodie, until the resolution of the mystery ties together the threads and we understand, for instance, why we have been entering the mind of senile Tilly, who, with us, witnessed the incident in the shopping centre.

This is a novel to take with you when you have a long journey to fill.

In One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson maintains the suspense right up to the last sentence. At first, when Jackson Brodie witnesses a road rage event that takes place in front of a crowd who are queueing for an Edinburgh festival event, he walks away.

Soon we are following the stories of a number of characters: Detective Inspector Louise Monroe, Martin Canning (the man who intervened in the road rage incident by hurling his laptop at a potential homicide perpetrator), Gloria Hatter, wife of a master criminal and a set of pink clad ‘housemaids’.

The novel is like the set of Russian dolls that plays its part in the story. Each event encapsulates others. A love story is developing between the lines too and as guns appear and disappear and murder follows murder, we wonder how Kate Atkinson will draw all the threads together. But she does in a superb concluding chapter.

Just like When Will There Be Good News, its sequel, this is a gripping crime novel.