How to search for a body underwater, how to facilitate your rescue if lost and drifting at sea, how to run a nightclub, how to bribe a cop, how to care for an invalid — you learn things while reading this novel. Egan’s fiction buzzes with factual crosscurrents, casually deployed.

This is a sea novel, one that is consistently aware of Manhattan as an island. Reading Edna O’Brien’s short stories, there’s nearly always a fire blazing in the background. In “Manhattan Beach,” nearly every scene is set against a river or an ocean or a tidal pool.

Water here is a place of rebirth and of mortal terror. Early in the novel, as Anna watches the sea, Egan writes: “There was a feeling she had, standing at its edge: an electric mix of attraction and dread. What would be exposed if all that water should suddenly vanish? A landscape of lost objects: sunken ships, hidden treasure, gold and gems and the charm bracelet that had fallen from her wrist into a storm drain.” There are dead bodies down there, too, Anna’s father tells her, in lines that ring like a premonition.

Anna goes to work at the Naval Yard, her eyes always flickering toward the ships in the water outside the factory windows. This novel has a bustling sense of war-work and women’s place in it. Dexter is given a look at this ferment, and he reports:

Image Women welders in 1943 in an unretouched photograph from The New York Times archive. Credit... Associated Press

“Eight hundred girls worked inside Building 4, a structural shop, their last stop. It was hard to separate them from the men — the welders especially, with their thick gloves and face shields. You had to go by stature, and as their group moved from bay to bay, Dexter got better at this. Girls holding blowtorches. Girls cutting metal into pieces; girls building molds of ship parts from wood. A matter-of-factness about even the pretty ones; look or don’t look.”

Egan is a generous writer. She doesn’t write dialogue, for example, so much as she writes repartee. Many writers’ books go slack when their characters open their mouths, as if dullness equals verisimilitude. Egan’s minty dialogue snaps you to attention.

Anna reads mystery novels, and this novel itself becomes a kind of noir thriller. Egan is aware of the bad luck and missed opportunities that can drive men and women toward crime.