The Wicked Redhead

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.

My Review


I like this author's books but sadly I was not in love with this book. While, I have not read the first book in this series, that was not the issue. It was the fact that I was not in "love" with the main characters. In the beginning, I did think I would really like Ella because she did show that she would bounce back on her feet but it was Gin that I did like.

Yet, I found the pacing in the beginning to be really slow. I even put the boo down and walked away from it for a bit. When I came back, I did pick up in the middle and the story got more intriguing and better. Gin was still my favorite. If the book could have just featured her I would have been happy. Ms. Williams does a wonderful job of writing time period books. Instantly, I am always transported to the time period in which the story is taking place in. This book may not have been a favorite of mine, I will still read books from this author.