The Wicked Widow (The Wicked City series, 3)
Williams continues her thoroughly enjoyable historical-romance-thriller Wicked City series about Geneva “Gin” Kelly, a feisty, foul-mouthed Appalachian transplant to flapper-era New York. The second volume, The Wicked Redhead, left Gin and her true love, Anson, alive but battered after barely escaping with their lives from a group of vicious rumrunners. As the third novel begins, Gin is enjoying wedded bliss with her handsome ex-Prohibition officer husband; faithful readers, however, will not be surprised that the good times don’t last forever. A second parallel plot centers on Ella, a New Yorker in 1998, who lives in the same Greenwich Village building Gin occupied in 1924, and sometimes receives ghostly intuitions from the woman she knows only through collectable naughty postcards featuring a bosomy redheaded model.
Ella, like Gin, begins the novel blissfully playing house with her new boyfriend, Hector, a doting musician. Like Gin’s, her life is quite complicated: she’s pregnant with her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s baby, and her 97-year-old aunt has tasked her with investigating a 75-year-old Federal trial involving both Gin and Anson. Williams piles on the danger in both timelines, while treating her fans to cameos from characters from her many novels featuring the sprawling Schuyler clan. As ever, her research into the city and the era is deep and detailed. Gin’s voice, as ever, is a unique mixture of mountain twang and New York slang; some readers might find it insufferable, but others will think it enchanting. There’s no one else in historical fiction who speaks this way, however, and those who enjoy this book will be grateful that Williams has hinted at further adventures to come for the Redhead.
