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Deborah Goodrich Royce

Biography

Deborah Goodrich Royce

Deborah Goodrich Royce’s thrillers examine puzzles of identity. RUBY FALLS won the Zibby Award for Best Plot Twist in 2021, and FINDING MRS. FORD was hailed by Forbes, Book Riot and “Good Morning America’s” “best of” lists in 2019. REEF ROAD is her latest novel.

She began as an actress on "All My Children" and in multiple films, before transitioning to the role of story editor at Miramax Films, developing Emma and early versions of Chicago and A Wrinkle in Time.

With her husband, Chuck, Deborah restored the Avon Theatre, Ocean House Hotel, Deer Mountain Inn, United Theatre, Savoy Bookstore, and numerous Main Street revitalization projects in Rhode Island and the Catskills.

She serves on the governing and advisory boards of the American Film Institute, Greenwich International Film Festival, New York Botanical Garden, Greenwich Historical Society, and the PRASAD Project.

Deborah holds a bachelor’s degree in modern foreign languages and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Lake Erie College.

Photo Credit: Carrie Bradburn, Capehart Photography

Books by Deborah Goodrich Royce

Reef Road
by Deborah Goodrich Royce - Fiction, Mystery, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

A young woman’s life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them. In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce’s REEF ROAD probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy, and like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.

Ruby Falls
by Deborah Goodrich Royce - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

On a brilliantly sunny July day, six-year-old Ruby is abandoned by her father in the suffocating dark of a Tennessee cave. Twenty years later, transformed into soap opera star Eleanor Russell, she is fired under dubious circumstances. Fleeing to Europe, she marries a glamorous stranger named Orlando Montague and keeps her past closely hidden. Together, Eleanor and Orlando start afresh in LA. Setting up house in a storybook cottage in the Hollywood Hills, Eleanor is cast in a dream role --- the lead in a remake of REBECCA. As she immerses herself in that eerie gothic tale, Orlando’s personality changes, ghosts of her past re-emerge, and Eleanor fears she is not the only person in her marriage with a secret.

Finding Mrs. Ford
by Deborah Goodrich Royce - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Early one morning in the summer of 2014, the FBI arrives to question Mrs. Ford about a man from Iraq --- a Chaldean Christian from Mosul --- where ISIS has just seized control. Sammy Fakhouri is his name, and they have taken him into custody, picked up on his way to her house. Back in the summer of 1979, on the outskirts of a declining Detroit, college coed Susan meets charismatic and reckless Annie. They are an unlikely pair of friends, but they each see something in the other --- something they’d like to possess. Together, the girls navigate the minefields of a down-market disco where they work their summer jobs. It’s a world filled with pretty girls and powerful men, some of whom --- like Sammy Fakhouri --- happen to be Iraqi Chaldeans. What happened in that summer of 1979 when Susan and Annie met? Why is Sammy looking for Susan all these years later? And why is Mrs. Ford lying?