Reading a novel sometimes gives us a sense of not only the characters’ emotions but the author’s.

There are novels that feel like they were written in anger, others that grow out of grief or passion. And sometimes it feels like the author is just fulfilling a contract.

Kate Atkinson’s “Death at the Sign of the Rook” feels like joy.

On every page, I had a sense of Atkinson having a ripping good time writing it. A propulsive mystery novel that’s also a loving parody of the cozy mystery genre and a brilliant display of literary skill, it’s a joy for the reader as well.

Atkinson, an English writer who lives in Scotland, has a distinguished three-decade career that has been split between award-winning literary novels — she is the first person to become a three-time winner of Britain’s prestigious Costa Book Award — and a bestselling series of mysteries about Yorkshire-born detective Jackson Brodie.

The first of those, published 20 years ago, was “Case Histories,” which is also the title of the BBC series starring Jason Isaacs as Brodie.

“Death at the Sign of the Rook” is her sixth book about the private investigator, a former soldier and police officer whose horrific childhood left him with a tough shell and an empathetic heart.

Brodie is now “the wrong side of sixty” and a grandfather, but he hasn’t changed much. Having decided to buy a house, he “had spent a good several weeks being sensible and mature and then he bought a Land Rover Defender instead. It was a rugged, blokey kind of vehicle.”

His personal life is as shambolic as ever, with the disembodied voices of his exes and other female figures living in his head as what he calls the Court of Women, which issues regular critiques.

His current girlfriend is Tatiana, who has an “unconventional CV — confirmed dominatrix, suspected assassin, ex-trapeze artist. ... Tatiana was feral and getting close to her was like cosying up to a tiger.”

Jackson might not make the best personal choices, but he’s better at solving other people’s problems. As “Rook” opens, he’s interviewing two new clients.

Twin siblings Hazel and Ian Padgett have recently lost their mother. They don’t think there’s any mystery to her death; Dorothy Padgett died in her bed in the peaceful village of Ilksley at age 96.

They’re already divvying up Dorothy’s knickknacks, but something is missing: a small portrait, an oil painting of a woman. They say they don’t know who painted it, although they believe it dates to the Renaissance, and that their late father bought it at an estate sale for pocket change.

It has hung for decades behind Dorothy’s bedroom door. It’s not really valuable, the twins assure Jackson, except sentimentally. But they want it back, and they seem sure it was taken by Dorothy’s live-in caregiver, a warm, competent young woman named Melanie Hope — who, in the couple of days since Dorothy’s death, seems to have vanished.

Jackson is intrigued by a photo of the painting, showing a beautiful young woman with “red-gold hair covered by an almost translucent veil.” She holds an animal that might be an ermine on her lap. “She looked,” Jackson thinks, “as though she might know something that you didn’t.”

He not only doubts the twins’ story, which seems a smidge rehearsed, but their estimate of the portrait’s value. So he dives into the case.

It turns out that there is another painting missing from another house not far away. It’s a very different artwork — a large painting by J.M.W. Turner, “Sunset Over Fountains Abbey,” cut out of its frame and removed at about the same time that a warm, competent young housekeeper named Sophie Greenway abruptly left her job a couple of years before.

It’s missing from a very different sort of house: Burton Makepeace, “one of England’s premier stately homes,” or at least it used to be. Now the enormous country house and its countless rooms are falling down around the ears of the financially reduced Milton family.

And if this is all starting to sound like an Agatha Christie novel, that’s intentional. Atkinson soon introduces us to a cast that feels right out of Christie: the dotty aristocrat Lady Milton, her skeevy sons Piers and Cosmo and horse-obsessed daughter Arabella, the clueless vicar Simon Cate, the manly war veteran Major Ben Jennings.

To stay afloat, Piers has turned Burton Makepeace into a hotel, much to his mother’s horror, and much of the book takes place there during an interactive murder mystery event featuring a troupe called the Red Herring Players.

Atkinson scatters sly jokes like rose petals, along with allusions to every detective from Sherlock to Poirot to Columbo to Robert Langdon.

She also does something Christie didn’t do: build complex characters. All props to Agatha as a godmother of the mystery novel, but her characters were mostly genteel cartoons.

Atkinson makes hers live and breathe and fits them out with compelling backstories and, in some cases, hilarious senses of humor. (I could read a whole book about the shamelessly snobby Lady Milton. She can’t stand to watch “Downton Abbey” because she thinks the Crawleys are too chummy with the servants.)

A classic detective needs a sidekick, of course, and luckily for us Atkinson brings back Reggie Chase, whom readers first met as a teenage babysitter embroiled in a murder in 2008′s “When Will There Be Good News?”

She’s now a police detective who worked on the case of the missing Turner. When she once again crosses paths with Jackson, he’s delighted — he thinks of her as a daughter, and a much more promising one than his own surly offspring — and she is exasperated. But she can’t resist working with him.

In Atkinson’s gifted hands, it all turns into a wonderful mashup of Christie mysteries and the wryly knowing “Knives Out” movies, plus a lot more. Despite the chaos, Atkinson is in control every step of the way, right down to the last meta twist. What a joy!

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Death at the Sign of the Rook

By Kate Atkinson

Doubleday, 320 pages, $27

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