The Wicked Redhead

A Wicked City Novel

By: Beatriz Williams

Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg, Julie McKay

Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2019 Beatriz Williams (P)2019 HarperAudio

Improved from the Wicked City!

I liked the plot of Wicked City but some of the dialogue was downright cringey and I felt like the author could have done better with the storyline because the idea was good..this continuation of it was much better than the first book! The dialogue wasn’t quite so silly and they even toned down a bit of the twangy country girl accent etc. to be less distracting. The plot also seemed better and overall I felt like it flushed out the story much better and I was happy to end the story on a better note for sure. I’d recommend reading the first one for context or else this story would be a little lackluster without knowing the first part of it, but book two definitely is an improvement!

forgettable

The frame story is more interesting than the story of the redhead (who isn't all that wicked) ... Why has the novel been set up to make it seem as if Ella's problems will be solved by finding out more about the redhead? Spoiler alert: Not much connection. Nice descriptions of Florida. But I kept forgetting who the main men in the redhead's story were. I don't know if I can try another by this author or not.