Book Reviews – Shrines of Gaiety

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

It’s 1926 and two young girls have run away to London to seek fame and fortune. The London they arrive in is in the midst of post-war giddiness and excess, and the centre of this are the clubs of Soho where starlets, foreign dignitaries and gangsters all gather. The empress of this Soho life is Nellie Coker, newly-released from Holloway Prison, who is helped by her six children to keep her empire running smoothly. The two naïve runaways are forced to embrace this seedy lifestyle when their money is stolen. Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Frobisher has made it his mission to close Nellie and her clubs down but he’s discovering that the bodies of young girls, mysteriously murdered, are being pulled out of the Thames with sickening regularity. This is a little bit of a whodunnit slotted into the kind of fabulous historical novel that Kate Atkinson does so well.