When a Night on the Town Means Drinking, Dancing and Death

Vivian Kelly, the heroine of Katharine Schellman’s fizzy series debut, LAST CALL AT THE NIGHTINGALE (Minotaur, 312 pp., $27.99), longs for escape. It’s Manhattan, 1924, not long after women gained the right to vote and lost the right to drink alcohol. The Jazz Age giveth and taketh away, but Vivian, a seamstress with an adventurous streak, doesn’t know that yet.

She’s having too much fun dancing and carousing every night at the champagne-soaked Nightingale, “secondhand spangles sewn onto the hem of her dress.” The fun at the speakeasy — which welcomes all races, sexes and genders, however furtively — is about to end, though: “The long, drawn-out wail of a trumpet could hide almost anything. Even the sound of murder.”

When Vivian stumbles across a dead man in the alley behind the club, where she’s gone for a bit of fresh air, the Nightingale’s alluring owner, Honor Huxley, ropes her into investigating the crime. After all, “there wouldn’t be any police. … and if someone did come to collect the body, the odds of them carefully looking around for evidence of who committed the crime were practically zero.”

What follows is a veritable trip through the demimonde, populated with the idle, dangerous rich and the desperate, hungry poor, all with motive and means to kill. Vivian is a terrific character, plucky and resourceful, determined to choreograph a different life for herself.

Alan Drew’s most recent novel, the harrowing and memorable “Shadow Man” (2017), was a character-driven mid-1980s police procedural set in Southern California. Though I thought highly of it and its protagonists, the detective Ben Wade and medical examiner Natasha Betencourt, sequel possibilities never entered my mind.