Kate Atkinson’s brilliant, award-winning books are hard to categorize, but the grand narrative sweep of some of her earlier novels like Life After Life and A God in Ruins have often invited comparison with as exalted a writer as Charles Dickens. That may sound cliched, but how else to describe the masterful way Atkinson not only musters up a city-full of characters but also slowly and smoothly binds them together through coincidence and hidden relationships?

Had Dickens had lived to write about the Jazz Age, he would surely have produced a novel much like Shrines of Gaiety, a sprawling, 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, absinthe cocktails, teenage runaways, snazzy roadsters and a bevy of Bright Young Things

For the British, World War I was fought close to home, and there’s still a mood of giddy survival underlaid by terrible loss

The book opens with a bustling scene outside Holloway prison: “’Is it a hanging?’ an eager newspaper delivery boy asked no one in particular.” He’s several decades too late to witness a public execution, but he, and the rest of throng, do get to observe the release from prison of the notorious Nellie Coker, the city’s Queen of Clubs. Nellie is a “short, owlish woman. … almost dwarfed by the enormous bouquet of white lilies and pink roses that was thrust into her arms.” She’s flanked by her four daughters and one of her two sons as she makes her way to her chauffeured Bentley –  prison hasn’t made a dent in her financial success

Coker – apparently modelled on Kate Meyrick, for many years the ‘queen of Sohos clubland’ –  is the operator of a series of nightclubs where London’s underworld and glitterati mingle, and the fierce matriarch of a large brood who are variously involved in her often nefarious enterprises. She presides over London’s Roaring Twenties nightlife at a time when there are few limits on indulgence. As Atkinson notes, it was an era when the respectable department store Harrods sold something called the Welcome Present for Friends that “contained cocaine, morphine, syringes, and needles.” The fun-seekers who crowd Nellie’s nightclubs include princes and pickpockets; mobsters and movie stars like Tallulah Bankhead

Among the crowd is a man determined to change her luck, a righteous police detective named John Frobisher. When he sees the Bentley, he thinks wryly, “Crime paid, fighting it didn’t.” His goal is to bring down Nellie’s empire of five nightclubs. “It was not the moral delinquency — the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs — that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London”

The matter of those girls will bring Frobisher into contact with Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian from Yorkshire. Gwendolen is more intriguing than that description might suggest; having served as a battlefront nurse during the war, then received an unexpectedly large inheritance, she’s come to London in search of one of those lost girls, Freda Murgatroyd, the runaway 14-year-old sister of her best friend. Frobisher quickly realizes Gwendolen is a better detective than he is. He tries not to admit his attraction to her, given that he has a wife, a Frenchwoman who suffered such trauma during the war she can barely communicate

Thanks to our omniscient narrator, we readers already know a lot more about Freda and her whereabouts than Gwendolen does. For one thing, we know she had dreams of dancing onstage, but she’s now dancing for tips from the sweaty, groping customers at Nellie’s clubs, where she’s regarded as “quite the little bon-bon”

In a bizarre turn of events, Gwendolen soon finds in a surprisingly apt position to spy on Nellie when the Queen of Clubs hires her to manage the Crystal Cup, one of her nightclubs, after she sees Gwendolen’s coolness under fire during a shooting. She also comes recommended by one of Nellie’s children, oldest son Niven, a James Bond-ish man about town. Gwendolen and Niven bond over their war experiences, but she doesn’t trust him

Nellie does, although she doesn’t have a lot of use for the rest of her offspring. Daughter Edith is entangled with another cop named Maddox, who has long been on Nellie’s payroll; Shirley and Phyllis are gossipy clotheshorses; youngest daughter Kitty is an afterthought. Nellie’s other son, hapless Ramsay, wants to be a novelist, but he doesn’t want to have to actually write anything

These are just some of the leading characters; Atkinson populates the book like a Dickens novel, with even minor characters who are memorable. The story is such a complex web of underhanded plotting and double-dealing that occasionally it’s hard to tell who’s out to get whom and what the game is, though this only makes it all that much more fun. The spell of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that hovers over the drama (It’s Gwendolen’s favourite play, and it’s being performed seemingly impromptu in Oxford when she and Inspector Frobisher visit, among other references – there’s even a donkey!) is somehow reassuring. And through it all, game Gwendolen’s “quiet magnificence” (per Inspector Frobisher) is a steadying influence, while plucky Freda animates an otherwise grim roll call of lost, mistreated, and cast-off girls, whose bodies keep being fished out of the Thames at a corner of a bridge known as Dead Man’s Hole. Frobisher mourns the drowned, nameless girls and grows more and more determined to find their killer, with Gwendolen’s help