The Wicked Redhead
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
From the dazzling New York Times bestselling author, Beatriz Williams
1924. Ginger Kelly wakes up in tranquil Cocoa Beach having fled to safety in the company of disgraced Prohibition agent Oliver Anson Marshall. 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.
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…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 modelled before she disappeared.
Two women, two generations, two urgent quests. But as Ginger and Ella track down their 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.
Reviews
Praise for Beatriz Williams:
'A world filled with elegance, charm, and bygone manners … No-one does it better than Beatriz' Jane Green
'Full of wit, romance, and surprising twists' Popsugar
'Definitely worth squeezing into your hand luggage' RED
'A fantastic summer read' HELLO
'Delightful and rewarding from an author to watch' WE LOVE THIS BOOK
'Williams' historical masterpiece is an all-encompassing, period-perfect read.' RT Book Reviews (Top Pick!)
'[A] fast-paced love story' O, The Oprah Magazine
'A candidate for this year's best beach read' Kirkus Book Reviews
About the author
A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA from Columbia, Beatriz Williams spent several years in New York and London hiding her early attempts at fiction, first on company laptops as a communications strategy consultant, and then as an at-home producer of small persons, before her career as a writer took off. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories of two remarkable women a generation apart are cleverly intertwined in Williams's sweeping family saga. In 1941, Lulu Randolph, a 25-year-old widowed American journalist, is in Nassau, Bahamas, to write society articles about the duke and duchess of Windsor, Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. The duke as governor of this island paradise with a dark side and the duchess are portrayed as sometimes helping, but often contributing to, its problems of social inequality, racial tension, and corruption; they could also be complicit in the murder of gold mine owner Harry Oakes, and there are whispers of their Nazi sympathies. As Lulu's royal access leads her deeper into Nassau's shady political world and into a murky letter-passing operation with the duke and duchess, she falls in love with Benedict Thorpe, an English botanist with a mysterious background, who is captured by the Nazis in Europe. In the second story line, set in 1900, young German baroness Elfriede von Kleist suffers from postpartum depression; her sister-in-law banishes her to a Swiss clinic. She falls in love with an English patient, Wilfred Thorpe; their relationship takes many twists and turns as a result of Wilfred's military career, Elfriede's husband's betrayal, and two tragic deaths. Past and present come together when a complicated family history becomes known to all. Williams (The Summer Wives) illuminates the story with exotic locales and bygone ambience, and seduces with the irresistible Windsors. Readers will appreciate the wartime espionage that keeps the suspense high.
