The Wicked Widow
A Wicked City Novel
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Gin Kelly, the wicked redhead, is back! Readers will delight in next installment of the Wicked City series by New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams.
June 1925. Audacious Appalachian flapper Geneva “Gin” Kelly prepares to trade her high-flying ways for respectable marriage to Oliver Anson Marshall, a steadfast Prohibition agent who happens to hail from one of New York’s most distinguished families. But just as wedding bells chime, the head of the notorious East Coast rum-running racket—and Anson’s mortal enemy—turns up murdered at a society funeral, and their short-lived honeymoon bliss goes up in a spectacular blaze that sends Anson back undercover...and into the jaws of a trap from which not even Gin can rescue him. As violence explodes around her, Gin must summon all her considerable moxie to trace the tentacles of this sinister organization back to their shocking source, and face down a legendary American family at a rigged game it has no intention of losing.
June 1998. When Ella Dommerich’s ninetysomething society queen aunt Julie ropes her into digging up dirt on Senator (and Presidential candidate) Franklin Hardcastle in order to settle old family scores, she couldn’t be less enthusiastic. Pregnant Ella’s recently ditched her unfaithful husband and settled into cozy—if complicated—domesticity with her almost-too-good-to-be-true musician boyfriend, Hector. But then the Hardcastle secrets lead to a web of shady dealings Ella’s uncovered in her job as a financial analyst, and the bodies start to tumble out of the venerable woodwork. With the help of her ex-husband and her mysterious connection to a certain redheaded flapper, Ella digs up more than mere dirt…only to discover herself standing alone between a legendarily ruthless family and the prize it’s sought for generations.
What ugly secrets lurk in the opulent enclaves—and bank accounts--of America’s richest families? And can two determined women from two different generations thwart the murderous legacy of the demon liquor?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams continues her Wicked City series (after the Wicked Redhead) with an engrossing New York City mystery spanning several decades. In 1998, Ella Dommerich moves into her boyfriend Hector's Greenwich Village walk-up, following her separation from Patrick, the father of her unborn child. Ella's aunt Julie asks her to use her investigative skills as a financial analyst to dig up dirt on Senator Frank Hardcastle, a presidential candidate who was once married to another relative of Ella and Julie's, and to whom Julie bears a grudge. In a parallel narrative set in 1924, Geneva Kelley marries Oliver Anson Marshall and they move into the townhouse later occupied by Hector and Ella. After Louis Hardcastle, the head of an East Coast bootlegging organization, is murdered, Louis's son blames Anson, a former Prohibition enforcement special agent, and Anson decides to fake his death and go into hiding to protect Geneva. As Ella continues to delve into the background of the Hardcastle family while enduring prenatal nausea, she discovers connections to Patrick's employer and some financial anomalies, and ropes Patrick in to an increasingly dangerous situation. Williams's fast-paced story line features engaging dialogue and thematic connections between Ella and Geneva. Series fans will eat this up.
