The Wicked City: A Novel

by Beatriz Williams

Overview

In the first book of a breathtaking new trilogy by bestselling author Beatriz Williams, two generations of women are brought together inside a Greenwich Village apartment —a flapper hiding an extraordinary past, and a modern-day Manattanite forced to start her life anew.

When she discovers her banker husband has been harboring a secret life, Ella Gilbert escapes her SoHo loft for a studio in Greenwich Village. Her charismatic musician neighbor, Hector, warns her to stay out of the basement after midnight, when a symphony of mysterious noise strikes up—laughter, clinking glasses, jazz piano, the occasional bloodcurdling scream—even though the space has been empty for decades. Back in the Roaring Twenties, the basement was home to one of the city’s most notorious speakeasies.

In 1924, Geneva “Gin” Kelly, a quick-witted flapper from the hills of western Maryland, is a regular at this Village hideaway. Caught up in a raid, Gin lands in the office of Prohibition enforcement agent Oliver Anson, who persuades her to help him catch her stepfather, Duke Kelly, one of the biggest bootleggers in Appalachia.

But Gin is nobody’s fool. She strikes a risky bargain with the taciturn, straight-arrow Revenue agent, and their alliance rattles Manhattan society to its foundations, exposing secrets that shock even this free-spirited redhead.

As Ella unravels the strange history of her new building—and the family thread that connects her to Geneva Kelly—she senses the Jazz Age spirit of her exuberant predecessor invading her own shy nature, in ways that will transform her existence in the wicked city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062405029
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/17/2017
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.40(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

09/01/2016
After flaming-haired, flaming-mouthed flapper Geneva "Gin" Kelly gets caught in the raid of a Greenwich Village speakeasy, Prohibition enforcement agent Oliver Anson asks her help in cornering her Appalachian bootlegger stepfather. In the present day, Ella Hawthorne discovers Gin's story when she moves into the building that housed the speakeasy. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2016-11-07
The first volume of Williams' planned series introduces two women who occupy the same Greenwich Village apartment seven decades apart.In a 1998 frame for the main Roaring '20s story, Ella, a forensic accountant by trade, has just left her investment-banker husband after catching him with a prostitute. She moves into a studio apartment, 4D, at 11 Christopher St. One of her first encounters, in the basement laundry room, is with Hector, who shares her interests and her talent for music. In the same laundry room, late at night, Ella hears jazz riffs seeping through the wall—odd, because the adjacent building is unoccupied. Cut to 1924, when Ginger Kelly, a typist who fled her Appalachian village for New York after her stepfather sexually assaulted her, occupies the same building, in that era a boardinghouse, and the same flat. Ginger frequents the neighboring cellar speak-easy (which features a jazz band) and, after being swept up in a raid, meets handsome Prohibition agent Oliver Anson. Returning briefly for her mother's funeral, Ginger observes that her stepfather, Duke Kelly, once a feckless barfly, has transformed his own fortunes and those of Ginger's hardscrabble hometown, River Junction, Maryland, with his bootlegging operations. The G-men are hot on Duke's trail, and Ginger is enlisted to act as a double agent, delivering packages for Duke and reporting to Anson. Will Anson prove to be as upstanding as he seems, and as hunkish? Very intermittently we return to Ella, who, after rebuffing her husband's apologies and getting in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commision, is revealed to be a Schuyler, that clan of Manhattan blue bloods that has anchored so many Williams novels. The parallels between the two heroines are underdeveloped, and Ginger's story is stalled by excessive verbiage designed, apparently, to showcase the author's fluency in Runyon-speak. Even for a series launch, too much is left dangling.

Kirkus Reviews