Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

This author is always entertaining, whether it be serious fiction (as this is) or more of a crime drama, she is fun to read. Her work set in or around this time period tends to be a bit darker, some would say Dickensian, where you are anxiously worried about an impending disaster, but that largely doesn't happen much here. This is a sprawling and sparkling tale set in London in 1926, overrun with flappers, gangsters, shilling-a-dance girls, disillusioned veterans of the Great War, crooked coppers, a serial killer (so some bad things happen), absinthe cocktails, teenage runaways, snazzy roadsters and a bevy of people with hope and promise but not much in the way of common sense. The figure at the center of this particular metropolitan web is a tough entrepreneur named Nellie Coker who presides over an empire of sin. Her string of five nightclubs stretches from the classy Amethyst to the low brow Sphinx. In the Author’s Note, Atkinson identifies the now largely forgotten Irishwoman Kate Meyrick, the “Night Club Queen” of Soho, as the real-life inspiration for Nellie and her brood of mostly adult children who help run the clubs. She goes to jail at one point, and spends the rest of the story figuring out who ratted her out, and she takes us along for the ride.