Night Glitter, by Jill Shure, is the sequel to Night Jazz. In Night Jazz, Jeri Devlin is looking for her brother who mysteriously disappeared. She goes to sleep in her hotel room in 1997 and wakes up in 1929, somehow transported back in time. You accompany Jeri as she makes a life for herself, finds love, and adapts to living in one of the most turbulent times in American history.
Night Glitter opens in 1933 in the San Fernando Valley. Jeri is broke, hiding from mobsters and living in The Rainbow Brothel in California. Lex is a patient at a sanitarium in New York recovering from tuberculosis. While I don’t remember there being many curse words in the first book, there are several in the prologue of the sequel, and lots more scattered throughout the story. If you cannot stand to have curse words in your reading material, even though the story is great, you may want to stay away from this one.
Chapter one takes us back to New York in October 1932 so we can experience Jeri’s journey from being financially stable and secure to living alone, separated from her husband, with barely any money at a brothel. Lex had known for a while that something serious was wrong with him. Not wanting to infect Jeri, he turned rather cold towards her. Though extremely close and intimate before sickness entered the picture, they are now beginning to drift apart, just as Lex planned. He is pushing her away, hoping she won’t miss him so much when he is no longer around.
A final vacation to Havana, Cuba is taken before Lex enters the sanitarium. Feeling bad for the way he has been treating Jeri, he tells her that she has always been the only one since they met. As he bids her goodbye a wad of money is stuffed in her hands. He tells her to go back home to California, not realizing the California she came from is very different than the one he is telling her to go to.
She settles into The Bayridge House and begins a search for her descendants. An interview with a movie producer is promising, but then the mobsters find her and want to know where Lex is. One of the guys beats her up and is about to rape her when he is interrupted at gunpoint by the landlady of the house. He flees and the landlady helps Jeri escape.
Meanwhile, Lex notices patients keep disappearing at the sanatorium and realizes they are dying. He is sure that he doesn’t have much longer left to live.
Jeri receives a letter from Keely, one of her and Lex’s former servants. Keely is apologetic. Forced to give out Jeri's location by the mobsters who caught up with her, she did manage to convince them she had no idea of Lex's location. The mystery of how the mobsters tracked her across the country is solved.
Once she leaves Bayridge house, she manages to find her ancestors. They are extremely stuffy, religious people. Young Lorena, Jeri's cousin and madam of the Rainbow Brothel, is the exception. She offers Jeri a room, without any obligation to work there, for a small amount of rent. Jeri gladly excepts and moves out of the dry, stuffy house.
Lex's mother pays him a visit. He gives the arrogant, snobby woman the letters he has written to Jeri and asks her to mail them. She says she will, but instead opens and reads them, then throws them in the fire. She is convinced that Lex has money hidden away somewhere, Jeri has plenty of money and that they have decided not to help her out any at all.
Lorena and a male friend take Jeri to a Hollywood party. Jeri isn’t really impressed by it - she used to go to them before she traveled back in time. She meets Franky Wyatt there, the guy she almost had a fling with in Havana before Lex was admitted to the sanitarium.
Jeri is separated from Lex only because of the tuberculosis. But she is lonely, and as a result, she falls hard for Franky. She begins an affair with this man, who is married to a movie star. There are plenty of sex scenes, but they are done tastefully. They are not so graphic that you feel dirty when you are through reading them.
The Rainbow Brothel burns down and Jeri, not wanting to move back in with her stuffy descendants, goes looking for a job as an actress. She ends up working as a servant for Lupe, the wife of the man she is having an affair with. Working for Lupe is never boring. She has a reputation for having a hot temper and for liking men. Lupe is also hiding a terrible secret. Another word of warning - incest comes into the picture. It is covered tastefully (if possible for something like that to be written about tastefully), but the scene where the secret is uncovered is enough to make you cry. I found the scene a bit disturbing, but it is necessary to understand why the character acts as she does.
I’m not going to tell you how the book ends. I’ll just leave you with some questions that will be answered. Does Lex recover from tuberculosis? Does Jeri ever find her way back to the 20th century? If she does make it back to the 20th century, does she take Lex with her? Is Jeri ever reunited with her brother?
Both books were sent to me free of charge by the publisher. I rather enjoyed reading them. The story was really good, entertaining, and easy to follow. The first book made me hungry to read its sequel and find out what happened.
If you would like to purchase a copy of either book from Amazon, I have included the proper links below.
