BRIEFLY NOTED.

One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown; $24.99). The second installment of the author's Jackson Brodie detective series is a complex jigsaw: when the driver of a rented Peugeot collides with a bat-wielding thug in a Honda Civic during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the outcome is seen through the eyes of numerous characters, including the whey-faced writer of cozy mysteries who comes to the driver's aid, the sardonic wife of a crooked real-estate developer, and Brodie himself, now retired and disgruntled about getting involved. The first Brodie book, "Case Histories," was propelled by a nuanced, psychological portrait of loss; here Atkinson's authoritative voice emerges only sporadically, and abrupt changes of scene disrupt the flow. Still, some of the characters, such as a snappy, overwhelmed single mother and cop, are finely rendered.

Troubling Love, by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa; $14.95). This slender novel is set in motion by the strange circumstances surrounding a death, but it is more concerned with the enigma of memory and self. Delia, a cartoonist living in Rome, receives three incoherent phone calls from her mother, who is supposed to be on her way from Naples; the next day, her mother's nearly naked body washes up onshore at a seaside resort town. In Naples for the funeral, Delia is confronted with the past she tried to disown as she struggles to make sense of the events leading to her mother's drowning. A shadowy figure named Caserta, the man Delia, as a five-year-old, accused her mother of having an affair with, reemerges as possibly the last person to see her alive. Ferrante's polished language belies the rawness of her imagery, which conveys perversity, violence, and bodily functions in ripe detail. Delia's discovery of the secret of her childhood is made all the more jarring by the story's disorienting mixture of fantasy and reality. ...