Revolving around nightclub owner Nellie Coker, who has just been released from a six-month stint in jail, it plods along until the disappearance of several young aspiring actresses intersects with the attempts of Nellie's long-standing rival to bring down her empire.

Although Shrines of Gaiety is a departure from her longstanding preoccupation with the Second World War, Atkinson reworks a number of her thematic interests, foremost of which is child abuse.

The dysfunctional parent-child relationships that pepper Atkinson's novels are paralleled by constellations of exploitation outside the home, as seen in her latest Jackson Brodie novel Big Sky, which revolves around a network of paedophiles.

In Shrines of Gaiety, girls and young women are manhandled by stepfathers, policeman, wealthy patrons and punters, but the rough justice so satisfyingly dispensed by her private investigator Jackson Brodie is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Atkinson's casual tour of everyday depravity veers into voyeurism.

Partly, this is a problem of characterisation. Atkinson uses an ensemble cast, flitting between Nellie and her six children, a parade of missing girls, a Detective called Frobisher who has his eye on Nellie's shady dealings, and his sidekick Gwendolen Kelly, a librarian moonlighting as a semi-private eye.

None, however, is fleshed out. Coker, perhaps intended as an enigma, ultimately cuts a bland figure; she is concerned for the upward mobility of her children without being fiercely protective of them, but also lacks the ruthlessness of her criminal nemeses.

Arguably there is a satisfying middle ground to be occupied here, but her character is so thinly drawn it is hard to discern what that might be.

The shadow of the first world war, similarly, becomes an easy justification for anything from marital dissatisfaction to criminal brutality.

The plot, already stretched thin by its cast, never really gets going, and there is not enough depth to compensate for its lack of pace. The phrase "Nellie didn't like games, there was always the chance that you could lose", is about as introspective as it gets.

To make matters worse, Atkinson's epigrammatic style is devoid of its previous zing, making her prose at times read like a pastiche of her own oeuvre, surely the literary equivalent of an own goal.

Perhaps this was a deliberate stylistic choice on Atkinson's part, intended to complement her depiction of the period's superficial charms, but it only succeeds in creating a general sense of drag, which is at odds with the era's other reputation for being fast-paced.

In the novel's opening pages, the fanfare surrounding Nellie's release is mistaken by onlookers as the prelude for an execution.

The resulting crowd comprises rich folk in evening dress "happily rubbing shoulders with lamplighters and milkmen and early shift-workers, not to mention the usual riff-raff and rubberneckers who were always attracted by the idea of a show, even if they had no idea what it might be".

This description also captures the flagging spirit of the novel Atkinson has produced, in which a general sense of spectacle gives way to a void.

This is especially disappointing given Atkinson's propensity for reworking myth and fairytale, often in the service of feminism.

Many fairytales are name-dropped, and the metropolis is even referred to as "fairyland" at one point, but this just adds to a general sense of confusion.

Nor is there a satisfying mingling of history and fiction, which has until now been the bedrock of Atkinson's entire body of work.

She displays her knowledge of the era ostentatiously, offering the reader a tour of its pop culture mainstays from the Bright Young Things to Tutankhamen's curse via the occasional den of iniquity.

Nellie Coker, whose surname evokes the period's famously superficial glitz, is inspired by Kate Meyrick, a notorious night club owner.

While this signals Atkinson's long running penchant for rewriting women back into history, her spotlight on women is undermined by her superficial treatment of the suffering of many female figures including Nellie's daughter Edith, who nearly dies after an abortion.

The despair of Frobisher's wife Adele, whose grief for the child she lost during the war pushes her into hallucinatory territory, feels similarly unnecessary.

Atkinson has depicted life's intractable cruelties with great poignancy elsewhere, including in her magisterial A God In Ruins and her Jackson Brodie series, but the knack eludes her here. Hopefully her next novel is a return to form.