There is an old adage in the game of cricket: Form is temporary, class is permanent. And while this might not be up there with "42" in the list of great answers, it does at least explain why Andrew Strauss is still playing test cricket for England. But what does it tell us about Kate Atkinson?

Ever since we read Human Croquet we've been wondering where Kate Atkinson fits into the pantheon of literature. Behind The Scenes At The Museum was a wonderful book - a complete work of poetry, drama and narrative. We even re-read it, which for someone who reads two books a year is quite a complement.

Human Croquet was poetic too, but if we are honest, overly-so, and dramatically it failed to capture our imagination, perhaps because the key "revelation" involved a character whom we had considered minor. Atkinson herself said that she had consciously tried not to write 'Ruby [the heroine of Behind The Scenes] Part II' but perhaps she was trying a little too hard.

Emotionally Weird? Well, in retrospect, she could have lost the "emotionally", because it was just weird - three (or was it four?) stories-within-stories, which varied from the scarcely-believable to the downright dull.

Nevertheless, we looked-forward to the play Abandonment, and were rewarded by a beautiful work of art - lyrical, and alive with the dramatic 'construction' which made Behind The Scenes such a success.

After Abandonment Atkinson's work took some interesting turns. Not The End Of The World professed to be a collection of short stories, but felt more like a half-completed novel, or one of those medieval poems of which only fragments survive. Then, in Case Histories, Atkinson created a significant male character for the first time, in whose shoes she sometimes seemed slightly uncomfortable.

Perhaps our feelings were best summed-up by our reaction to seeing the first edition of One Good Turn in Waterstones at the end of last year - for the first time since Human Croquet, we decided to wait for the paper-back.

We were wrong!

With One Good Turn, Atkinson re-visits her male hero - the detective Jackson Brodie - and this time, the slippers fit more like Cinderella than the ugly sister of Case Histories. Despite a complex (even, far-fetched) plot, and cast of characters longer than a feature-length episode of The Bill, you never quite loose track of the time and space in which it all exists. It is beautifully written, such that your eyes just glide along the page; and, in true "murder mystery" fashion, the narrative climax runs right onto the last line. Form is temporary... but Kate Atkinson is permanent!