Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

Two teenage friends, Freda and Florence, run away from home in York in 1926 and head to London to make their fortunes on the stage. Gwendolen Kelling, a friend of Freda's half-sister, agrees to try and find them. Miss Kelling teams up with Detective Inspector John Frobisher who is investigating the night clubs run by Nellie Coker, who has just been released from a six-month prison sentence. Coker, whose clientele includes the Prince of Wales and Aga Khan, is fighting her own battles. And someone is killing young woman and dumping them in the Thames...

These are just some of the many, many characters in this sprawling, 500-page novel. As with Atkinson's Case Histories, a number of stories are all happening at once, not always in chronological order. It's often warm and funny and yet there's an undercurrent of real threat. Many characters are haunted by their life-changing experience of war, which informs the violence. Mrs Kelling, for example, is a former nurse and knows how to deal with a bullet wound. Another shadow cast over events is the discovery, four years prior to the story being told, of the tomb of Tutankhamun. At one point, it almost seems credible that the ghost of the Egyptian pharaoh might be the one killing the young women.

Yet the novel stays in the realistic. It all feels real, too - the different clubs, each with their own vibe and clientele, all add to a rich and teeming sense of the metropolis and its many dangers. Gwendolen is figure I recognise from my reading of contemporary sources for my own Sherlock Holmes novel: an intelligent, able woman empowered by her war work and enjoying a new-found liberty to carve out her own role. (The fact she's unwittingly come into a great deal of money doesn't hurt.)

Atkinson lists a range of intriguing sounding sources in her author's note, but also admits that she has fudged some details - for example, one character has read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, though this novel is set months before that was published. As she says, she's writing fiction not history and nothing jarred me out of the story.

There are some extraordinary coincidences - a girl called Gertie happens to look just like Freda and is in the wrong place at the wrong time, while a mother who comes to see Frobisher describes her daughter wearing a locket that is one of a very small collection of items we know Frobisher has already found. I think Ramsay Coker's efforts to write his own thrilling, insider's-eye novel about the "Age of Glitter" is a little on the nose. And there is also a little cheating, such as the shock 'death' of a character at the very end of a chapter (p. 361) who is later revealed merely to have fainted.

But that reprieve makes it all the more surprising at the end when a number of principal figures are bumped off abruptly. It's been a lively, fun adventure but we feel their loss, and we want to know what happens to the survivors. We last see Gwendolen hesitating over a question put to her by a man, and are left hanging as to what she might choose to do. There, I think, is scope for a whole new story...