Doesn't this book have a great title? I was favorably disposed even before I started reading, just on the strength of the name. It also refers to color, so I can claim the book for category 1 (Colorful Crime) of the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge.
The title character is Gene Taylor, a woman who has grown up in the school of hard knocks and is desperrate to make a dollar--or in this case $10,000, which is the fee she will get for marrying a serial wife killer in order to trap him when he tries to kill her. Really. For those of you with legalistic minds out there, this is not entrapment, because it's not the police who have come up with this plan. It's J. B. Stanford, president of his own life insurance company, who is so furious that his agent sold a life insurance policy to Mr. Bluebeard on his 7th wife that he wants to make sure he has bulletproof evidence to put the guy away for good. Jack Graham is the agent who had the misfortune to sell the policy to Mr. Bluebeard, and he ends up working closely with Gene on executing the plot to catch Bluebeard, and also falls in love with her.
I wouldl describe this booknas suspense, not mystery, because there's never any mystery about who the murderer is. The chase and the battle of wits are the thing here. I had a lot of fun reading the book.
I'm a long-time Hillary Waugh fan, so just a couple of notes for those of you who aren't familiar with his writing. I think he's best known for his police procedurals like Last Seen Wearing . . . (1952), which was really ground-breaking for its time. His first three books feature a two-fisted, independently wealthy amateur detective in New York City. Those are interesting--I've read two out of theee--but I wouldn't go out of my way to find them.
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