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Beatriz Williams

Biography

Beatriz Williams

Beatriz Williams is the New York Times, USA Today and internationally bestselling author of THE BEACH AT SUMMERLY, OUR WOMAN IN MOSCOW, THE SUMMER WIVES, HER LAST FLIGHT, THE GOLDEN HOUR, THE SECRET LIFE OF VIOLET GRANT, A HUNDRED SUMMERS and several other works of historical fiction, including three novels in collaboration with fellow bestselling authors Karen White and Lauren Willig. 

A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in Finance from Columbia University, Beatriz worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before she turned her attention to writing novels that combine her passion for history with an obsessive devotion to voice and characterization. Beatriz’s books have won numerous awards, have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and appear regularly in bestseller lists around the world.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Beatriz now lives near the Connecticut shore with her husband and four children, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

Books by Beatriz Williams

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Beatriz Williams’ novels inhabit a category all their own: nuanced yet propulsive, innovative yet addictive, packed with human truth and told in an incomparable narrative voice that evokes a stunning sense of period while still feeling new and immediate. Now the beloved author returns with another remarkable summer novel. In these gorgeous sun-washed pages, Williams sets THE BEACH AT SUMMERLY in the exclusive New England summer enclave readers first discovered in THE SUMMER WIVES and fills it with new love, old rivalries and the Cold War intrigue of the 1960s.

by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

From the New York Times bestselling team of Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White comes a novel of money and secrets set among the famous summer mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, spanning over a century from the Gilded Age to the present day.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets? Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic parting in Rome in the summer of 1940, as war engulfed the continent and Iris fell desperately in love with an enigmatic United States Embassy official named Sasha Digby. Within days, Ruth is on her way to Moscow, posing as the wife of counterintelligence agent Sumner Fox in a precarious plot to extract the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance, Women's Fiction

June 1925: Audacious Appalachian flapper Geneva “Gin” Kelly prepares to trade her high-flying ways for respectable marriage to Oliver Anson Marshall. But just as wedding bells chime, the head of the notorious East Coast rum-running racket turns up murdered at a society funeral, and their short-lived honeymoon bliss goes up in a spectacular blaze. June 1998: When Ella Dommerich’s ninetysomething society queen aunt Julie ropes her into digging up dirt on Senator (and Presidential candidate) Franklin Hardcastle, she couldn’t be less enthusiastic. But then the Hardcastle secrets lead to a web of shady dealings Ella has uncovered in her job as a financial analyst, and the bodies start to tumble out of the venerable woodwork. 

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance, Women's Fiction

In 1947, photographer and war correspondent Janey Everett arrives at a remote surfing village on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to research a planned biography of forgotten aviation pioneer Sam Mallory, who joined the loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War and never returned. Obsessed with Sam’s fate, Janey has tracked down Irene Lindquist, the owner of a local island-hopping airline, who she believes might actually be the legendary Irene Foster, Mallory’s onetime student and flying partner. Foster’s disappearance during a round-the-world flight in 1937 remains one of the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries. At first, the flinty Mrs. Lindquist denies any connection to Foster. But Janey informs her that the wreck of Sam Mallory’s airplane has recently been discovered in a Spanish desert, and piece by piece, the details of Foster’s extraordinary life emerge.

by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White - Fiction, Historical Fiction

The New York Times bestselling authors of THE GLASS OCEAN and THE FORGOTTEN ROOM --- Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White --- return with a glorious historical adventure that moves from the dark days of two World Wars to the turbulent years of the 1960s, in which three women with bruised hearts find refuge at Paris's legendary Ritz hotel.

written by Beatriz Williams, read by Cassandra Campbell - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance, Women's Fiction

In 1947, photographer and war correspondent Janey Everett arrives at a remote surfing village on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to research a planned biography of forgotten aviation pioneer Sam Mallory, who joined the loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War and never returned. Obsessed with Sam’s fate, Janey has tracked down Irene Lindquist, the owner of a local island-hopping airline, who she believes might actually be the legendary Irene Foster, Mallory’s onetime student and flying partner. Foster’s disappearance during a round-the-world flight in 1937 remains one of the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries. At first, the flinty Mrs. Lindquist denies any connection to Foster. But Janey informs her that the wreck of Sam Mallory’s airplane has recently been discovered in a Spanish desert, and piece by piece, the details of Foster’s extraordinary life emerge.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Newly widowed Leonora “Lulu” Randolph arrives in the Bahamas to investigate the Governor and his wife for a New York society magazine. After all, American readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. What more intriguing backdrop for their romance than a wartime Caribbean paradise, a colonial playground for kingpins of ill-gotten empires? But as she infiltrates the Duke and Duchess’s social circle, and the powerful cabal that controls the islands’ political and financial affairs, Lulu uncovers evidence that beneath the glister of Wallis and Edward’s marriage lies an ugly --- and even treasonous --- reality.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance, Women's Fiction

It’s 1924, and Ginger Kelly has fled south to safety in the company of disgraced Prohibition agent Oliver Anson Marshall and her newly orphaned young sister, Patsy. But then Marshall is reinstated to the agency with suspicious haste and put to work patrolling for rumrunners on the high seas, from which he promptly disappears. Gin hurries north to rescue him, only to be trapped in an agonizing moral quandary by Marshall’s desperate mother. It’s 1998, and Ella Dommerich has finally settled into her new life in Greenwich Village, inside the same apartment where a certain redheaded flapper lived long ago. Ella is eager to piece together the history of the mysterious Gin Kelly, whose only physical trace is a series of rare vintage photograph cards for which she modeled before she disappeared.

by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

From the New York Times bestselling authors of THE FORGOTTEN ROOM comes a captivating historical mystery, infused with romance, that links the lives of three women across a century --- two deep in the past, one in the present --- to the doomed passenger liner, RMS Lusitania.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, Miranda is catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools. Isobel Fisher, Miranda’s new stepsister, is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society. Uneasy among Isobel’s privileged friends, she finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, who has enjoyed an intense, complex friendship with Isobel. As the summer winds to its end, Miranda is caught in a catastrophe that will shatter Winthrop’s hard-won tranquility and banish her from the island for nearly two decades.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Burdened by a dark family secret, Virginia Fortescue flees her oppressive home in New York City for the battlefields of World War I France. As the war rages, Virginia falls into a passionate affair with the dashing Captain Simon Fitzwilliam, only to discover that his past has its own dark secrets --- secrets that will damage their eventual marriage. Five years later, the newly widowed Virginia Fitzwilliam arrives in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to settle her husband’s estate. Despite the evidence, Virginia does not believe Simon perished in the fire that destroyed the seaside home he built for her and their young daughter. Separated from her husband since the early days of their marriage, the headstrong Virginia plans to uncover the truth, for the sake of the daughter Simon never met.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

When she discovers that her banker husband has been harboring a secret life, Ella Gilbert escapes their sleek SoHo loft for a studio in a quaint building 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, even though it's stood empty for decades. Back in the Roaring Twenties, the building hosted one of the city’s most notorious speakeasies. As Ella unravels the strange history of the building --- and the family thread that connects her to flapper Geneva Kelly --- she senses the Jazz Age spirit of her incandescent predecessor invading her own shy nature, in ways that will transform her life in the wicked city.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

As the freedom of the Jazz Age transforms New York City, the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall has done the unthinkable: she’s fallen in love with her young paramour, Captain Octavian Rofrano, a handsome aviator and hero of the Great War. While times are changing and she does adore the Boy, divorce for a woman of Theresa’s wealth and social standing is out of the question, and there is no need; she has an understanding with Sylvo, her generous and well-respected philanderer husband. But their relationship subtly shifts when her bachelor brother, Ox, decides to tie the knot with the sweet younger daughter of a newly wealthy inventor.

by Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig - Fiction, Historical Fiction

When the critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought to a private hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1945, young Dr. Kate Schuyler is drawn into a complex mystery that connects three generations of women in her family to a single extraordinary room in a Gilded Age mansion. Who is the woman in Captain Ravenel's portrait miniature who looks so much like Kate? And why is she wearing the ruby pendant handed down to Kate by her mother?

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance

To find a way to take care of herself and the baby she carries, Pepper Schuyler fixes up a beautiful and rare vintage Mercedes and sells it at auction. But the car's new owner, the glamorous Annabelle Dommerich, has her own secrets: a Nazi husband, a Jewish lover, a flight from Europe, and a love so profound it transcends decades. As the many threads of Annabelle's life before the Second World War stretch out to entangle Pepper in 1960s America, and the father of her unborn baby tracks her down, the two women must come together to face down the shadows of their complicated pasts.

by Heather Webb, Hazel Gaynor, Beatriz Williams, Jennifer Robson, Jessica Brockmole, Kate Kerrigan, Evangeline Holland, Lauren Willig, and Marci Jefferson - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Short Stories

November 11, 1918. In the aftermath of World War I, soldiers, loved ones and survivors await the years ahead with hope, even as their hearts are marked by all those who have been lost. As families come back together, lovers reunite and strangers take solace in each other, everyone has a story to tell.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance

In the summer of 1966, Christina Hardcastle (“Tiny” to her illustrious family) stands on the brink of a breathtaking future. Together she and her husband, Frank, make the ultimate power couple. But as the season gets underway at the family estate on Cape Cod, three unwelcome visitors appear in Tiny’s perfect life: her volatile sister, Pepper; an envelope containing an incriminating photograph; and the intimidating figure of Frank’s cousin, Vietnam war hero Caspian, who knows more about Tiny’s rich inner life than anyone else.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romantic Suspense, Suspense

Vivian Schuyler has recently defied the privilege of her storied old Fifth Avenue family to do the unthinkable for a budding Kennedy-era socialite: break into the Madison Avenue world of razor-stylish Metropolitan magazine. But when she receives a bulky overseas parcel in the mail, the unexpected contents draw her inexorably back into her family’s past, and the hushed-over crime passionnel of an aunt she never knew, whose existence has been wiped from the record of history.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Nick and Budgie Greenwald are an unwelcome specter from New York socialite Lily Dane’s past: her former best friend and her former fiancé, now recently married. Budgie’s arrival to restore her family’s old house puts her once more in the center of the community’s social scene. The ties that bind Lily to Nick are too strong and intricate to ignore, and the two are drawn back into long-buried dreams, despite their uneasy secrets and many emotional obligations.

by Beatriz Williams - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance

A young Wall Street analyst, Kate Wilson learned to rely on logic and cynicism. So why does she fall so desperately in love with Julian Laurence, a billionaire with a mysterious past? What she doesn't know is that he has been waiting for her...the enchanting woman who emerged from the shadows of the Great War to save his life.