The Wicked Redhead: A Wicked City Novel

by Beatriz Williams

Overview

The dazzling narrator of The Wicked City brings her mesmerizing voice and indomitable spirit to another Jazz Age tale of rumrunners, double crosses, and true love, spanning the Eastern seaboard from Florida to Long Island to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

1924. Ginger Kelly wakes up in tranquil Cocoa Beach, Florida, having fled south to safety in the company of disgraced Prohibition agent Oliver Anson Marshall and her newly-orphaned young sister, Patsy. But paradise is short-lived. Marshall is reinstated to the agency with suspicious haste and put to work patrolling for rumrunners on the high seas, from which he promptly disappears. Gin hurries north to rescue him, only to be trapped in an agonizing moral quandary by Marshall’s desperate mother. 

1998. Ella Dommerich has finally settled into her new life in Greenwich Village, inside the same apartment where a certain redheaded flapper lived long ago...and continues to make her presence known. Having quit her ethically problematic job at an accounting firm, cut ties with her unfaithful ex-husband, and begun an epic love affair with Hector, her musician neighbor, Ella’s eager to piece together the history of the mysterious Gin Kelly, whose only physical trace is a series of rare vintage photograph cards for which she modeled before she disappeared.

Two women, two generations, two urgent quests. But as Ginger and Ella track down their separate quarries with increasing desperation, the mysteries consuming them take on unsettling echoes of each other, and both women will require all their strength and ingenuity to outwit a conspiracy spanning decades.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062660329
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Series:	Wicked City Series , #2
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	81,084
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Beatriz Williams is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, including Her Last Flight, The Summer Wives, and The Golden Hour, as well as All the Ways We Said Goodbye, cowritten with Lauren Willig and Karen White. A native of Seattle, she graduated from Stanford University and earned an MBA in finance from Columbia University. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

Editorial Reviews

11/22/2019

In the Jazz Age 1920s, Ginger Kelly, an audacious flapper, her sister, Patsy, and Ginger's boyfriend Oliver Anson Marshall, a disgraced Prohibition agent, flee New York for Florida. When Oliver is hastily reinstated by the agency and sent on a mission, he disappears. In his absence, Ginger and Patsy are lured back to New York by Oliver's mother, a woman with ulterior motives, who drives a very hard bargain. In 1998, Ella, pregnant and separated from her cheating husband, moves into an old Greenwich Village apartment and unexpectedly finds love with neighbor Hector. With her ordered life now in disarray, Ella goes in search of the woman who once resided in her apartment, captured in a vintage photograph titled "Redhead Beside Herself." Williams (Cocoa Beach) uses a dual-narrative approach to draw parallels between the two women. Ginger is the predominant character, while Ella, who lives a bit vicariously through Ginger, is a conduit between past and present. Ginger truly shines, but, unfortunately, the remaining characters are underdeveloped. VERDICT A few tense moments of suspense and high-seas adventure liven up an otherwise lethargic plot in this sequel to the first book in the series, The Wicked City. [See Prepub Alert, 5/20/19.]—Julie Whiteley, Stephenville, TX

Library Journal

2019-10-28
Williams' follow-up to The Wicked City (2017) continues the Prohibition-era adventures of a young woman torn between two brothers.

We last saw titular redhead Geneva "Ginger" Kelly on the lam with her new boyfriend, Prohibition agent Oliver Anson, after a violent altercation with Appalachian bootleggers, including Ginger's villainous stepfather, Duke Kelly, who died in the melee. Another casualty of that violence, Oliver's younger brother, Billy, jaw shattered by Duke's brass knuckles, is now under the care of the brothers' mother, the imperious blueblood Mrs. Marshall. This novel opens as Oliver and Ginger have taken refuge in Cocoa Beach, Florida, with the Fitzwilliams, whom readers will recall from another Williams series (Cocoa Beach, 2017, etc.). In a continuing storyline from the first installment, Ella Gilbert, in 1998, is trying to sort out her love life with soul mate Hector, particularly now that she's learned she's pregnant by her soon-to-be-ex hubby, Patrick. Ella's story is still tangential to Ginger's tale despite stronger hints of linkages between the two women. Since nothing much is going on in Florida except an ominous, too-brief introduction to the armada of rum-running vessels lurking just outside coastal waters, the action (such as it is) shifts to the Marshalls' Manhattan and Southampton manses. Mrs. Marshall, aware that Ginger and Billy were once lovers, has summoned Ginger to help with Billy's recovery—by pretending to be his pregnant fiancee. Unhelpfully, Ginger's soul mate, Oliver, has gone back undercover and is oddly cold toward her. Ginger's first-person voice, that of a feisty hillbilly-turned-Manhattan flapper, is authentic enough, if a bit stilted, as if too much research had gone into imagining her argot. And Ginger's mental observations are recounted with a degree of detail that, while fulfilling its intended effect of re-creating the period and social milieu, does little to advance the story. There really is no throughline here—this novel is largely an extended anticlimax to Volume 1. After 400-plus pages, many loose ends remain, perhaps auguring a third book.

A seemingly superfluous sequel.

Kirkus Reviews