The wicked widow

Williams is back with an installment in her Wicked City series (starting with The Wicked City, 2017), featuring dual timelines and Jazz Age flapper Gin Kelly. In 1998, Ella Dommerich is just separated from her cheating husband, pregnant, and moving in with her new beau, Hector. Ella's aunt asks her to dig up some dirt on current presidential candidate Franklin Hardcastle, who was briefly married to another relative of theirs. Ella discovers a mysterious connection to Gin Kelly, as well as some shady dealings with the Hardcastles, but she is fired from her analyst job before she can uncover the whole truth. In the 1920s, Gin Kelly is happy to play the role of new wife to Oliver Anson Marshall, but after some honeymoon bliss, Anson has to go undercover once again as a Prohibition agent, this time faking his own death. Gin is now pregnant and a "widow" when she finds that she is not safe from the violence of the bootlegging industry. Both women face danger from different generations of Hardcastles, and they fear for those they love. Series fans will enjoy.

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. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, ICM Partners. (Oct.)

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