The Wicked City Books in Order

The Wicked City books plunge you into the grit and glamour of Prohibition while keeping one foot in a more recent New York. The series revolves around two women sharing the same Greenwich Village building in different eras: a red‑haired flapper dodging bootleggers, and a modern analyst trying to rebuild her life.

In The Wicked City, Ella Gilbert flees her sleek SoHo loft after discovering her banker husband’s secret life. Her new apartment is in an old Village building with a boarded‑up basement that seems oddly alive after midnight. From there, the story slips back to 1924 and Geneva “Gin” Kelly, a sharp‑tongued flapper who grew up poor in the Maryland hills and now spends her nights at a hidden speakeasy in the same building.

Gin’s stepfather is a ruthless bootlegger, and Oliver Anson, a principled Prohibition agent, wants her help bringing him down. Gin is torn between the safety represented by her on‑again, off‑again Princeton beau and the dangerous honesty Anson offers. As raids, bribes, and betrayals pile up, the book shows how a young woman with very little power still finds ways to choose her own path.

Ella’s chapters, set in the late 1990s, mirror Gin’s dilemmas in a different key. She’s untangling financial misconduct at her old firm, dealing with an ex‑husband who won’t quite let go, and slowly falling for her musician neighbor, Hector. The ghost of Gin Kelly seeps into Ella’s life through old photographs, family connections, and strange noises from that forbidden basement, blurring the line between past and present.

The Wicked Redhead and The Wicked Widow push the story outward from that Greenwich Village core. Gin’s adventures take her from Cocoa Beach, Florida, to Long Island and beyond as she matches wits with rumrunners, crime families, and the formidable Marshall clan. Ella, meanwhile, keeps tripping over the long shadow of those Prohibition‑era choices while navigating pregnancy, career upheaval, and the resurgence of powerful political dynasties.

Across all three books, expect a heady mix of speakeasies, rum boats, jazz, and smoky back rooms, balanced by cubicles, spreadsheets, and late‑1990s Manhattan anxieties. The tone is fast and sly: plenty of banter, some bruising violence, and a constant sense that money and power are rewriting the rules for everyone.

You can read any volume on its own, but following the series in order lets you watch Gin and Ella grow into themselves, and reveals how one flapper’s fight against corruption keeps rippling forward into another woman’s supposedly more enlightened age.