The combination of light and dark has always been an Atkinson specialty but it's better than ever here. I love Kate Atkinson’s writing style and always enjoy reading her books, The Shrines of Gaiety being no exception. As with many Atkinson novels, there are small elements of magical realism which add to the colour and atmosphere but which don’t detract from the main story. There is money to be made in a place where the rich are desperate to have fun and the desperate will do anything to survive.

Shrines of Gaiety,’ by Kate Atkinson - The New Book Review: ‘Shrines of Gaiety,’ by Kate Atkinson - The New

Shrines of Gaiety is a witty romp of a novel that takes place in the dark underbelly of London during the Roaring 20s. Nellie Coker, the proprietress of several of London's most popular clubs, has just been released from prison after serving a few months for minor crimes. KATE ATKINSON won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum.It gets somewhat interesting as the you move along, with some great instances of humor and even some suspense, but for the most part, it's just boring and gets too long to get the point. We also get a final section on what happened to the characters afterwards, something I always appreciate. Worse still, there’s a new broom in town: upstanding DCI Frobisher, keener than his colleagues to investigate a flood of missing girls, among them 14-year-old runaway Freda, whose dreams of West End stardom run aground on the night-time economy’s thirst for flesh. Case Histories introduced her readers to Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, and won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.

Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel: Atkinson, Kate: 9780593466322 Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel: Atkinson, Kate: 9780593466322

Reading it felt a lot like an extremely well plotted prestige tv series, where you spend the first two episodes planting a lot of seeds and learning who everyone is, then you get to just watch it go from there. She is a powerful, successful, pagan and ruthless force of nature to be reckoned with, operating in a cut throat man's world of business of the time, wedded to reading the future through the cards and haunted by a past that has her constantly seeing the dripping wet, ghostly appariton of a young girl. Nellie Coker, newly released from Holloway Prison, is the matriarch of the family that runs several successful dance halls in London. And not only the police are interested in the fate of Nellie’s clubs, there are other forces doing their best to take them over.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •The award-winning author of Life after Life transports us to a restless London in the wake of the Great War—a city bursting with money, glamour, and corruption—in this spellbinding tale of seduction and betrayal.