The Wicked Red Head ~ Beatriz Williams

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (December 10, 2019)

“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 thoughts:

Phew! This was a wild ride. I adored the first book in the series. Split between two separate decades, two separate, yet intrinsically linked lives, two women race against time to track down their own goals. It’s fitting that I was reading this coming in to the “new 20’s”.

I often find stories like this tedious and hard to follow but Williams has a gorgeous storytelling voice, weaving in and out of two different timelines seamlessly.

Amanda Suanne Photography

About Beatriz Williams

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.

Find out more about Beatriz at her website, and connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

As always, don’t just take my word for it! Check out the other tour stops on this TLC Tour:

Instagram Features

Tuesday, December 10th: Instagram: @owlslittlelibrary

Tuesday, December 10th: Instagram: @jessicamap

Wednesday, December 11th: Instagram: @book.hang.o.ver

Friday, December 13th: Instagram: @downtogetthefictionon

Saturday, December 14th: Instagram: @lavieestbooks

Sunday, December 15th: Instagram: @wherethereadergrows

Monday, December 16th: Instagram: @tarheelreader

Tuesday, December 17th: Instagram: @bookishblissandbeauty

Wednesday, December 18th: Instagram: @thephdivabooks

Sunday, December 22nd: Instagram: @girlwithnoselfie

Review Stops

Tuesday, December 10th: The Pages In-Between

Wednesday, December 11th: Jessicamap Reviews

Thursday, December 12th: Instagram: @lauralovestoread

Friday, December 13th: Reading Reality

Friday, December 13th: View from the Birdhouse

Sunday, December 15th: Girl Who Reads

Monday, December 16th: bookchickdi

Tuesday, December 17th: Broken Teepee

Wednesday, December 18th: The Reading Corner For All

Thursday, December 19th: A Chick Who Reads

Friday, December 20th: 100 Pages a Day…Stephanie’s Book Reviews

Monday, December 23rd: Always With a Book

Friday, December 27th: Instagram: @beritaudiokilledthebookmark

Monday, December 30th: Instagram: @babygotbooks13

Tuesday, December 31st: Instagram: @libraryinprogress

Thursday, January 2nd: Instagram: @kraysbookclub

Friday, January 3rd: Iwriteinbooks’s blog

Monday, January 6th: Instagram: @shereadswithcats