Cocoa Beach by Beatriz Williams

Cocoa Beach by Beatriz Williams
Published by William Morrow ISBN 9780062681690
Hardcover, $27.99, 384 pages

One of the great pleasures of reading Beatriz Williams' books is that if you are intrigued by a secondary character, frequently you will get more of them in a subsequent book. In a previous book, A Certain Age, set in the jazz age of New York City, Virginia Fortescue is the older sister of Sophie, who is a major character in the book. We learn a little bit about Virginia, enough to peak our interest.

In Cocoa Beach we get Virginia's story. During WWI, Virginia volunteered to work overseas in France, driving an ambulance to bring wounded men to get medical attention. She meets a handsome British doctor, Simon, and they quickly fall in love, even though Simon is married.

Simon has a difficult family situation, as does Virginia, perhaps that is one thing that attracts them to each other. They marry, but soon something tears them apart. They are separated for three years, and then Virginia is notified that Simon has died in a fire on his property in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Virginia goes to Cocoa Beach with her three year-old daughter and finds Simon's brother and sister waiting for her. She has her doubts about her husband's death, and is determined to get to the bottom of what Simon has been up to for these three years.

Williams' drops us into the humid, muggy atmosphere of south Florida, and you can almost smell the sea air, taste the sweet oranges, and feel the hot sand under your feet.

One thing I find interesting about many of Williams' female characters is their interest in cars. In Cocoa Beach, A Certain Age, and Tiny Little Thing, the women learn not only how to drive cars, but to repair and maintain them as well. This is most unusual for women of these times.

The writing in this story reminds me of watching a 1940's Barbara Stanwyck movie on Turner Classic Movies. The dialogue is rat-a-tat-tat, and the repartee is snappy. Cocoa Beach could have easily been a movie about the 1920's made in 1947.

 I also enjoyed the British slang in this book- "dosh" (money), "rotter" (a bad guy, a "player"), and "skint" (broke). Fair warning: I will be tossing these terms around in my everyday language.

You don't need to have read A Certain Age to enjoy Cocoa Beach, but you will have a deeper appreciation if you did. And I was happy to see Marshall, the Prohibition agent from A Certain Age, pop up here; I hope the end of this story leads us to see more of him in the next Beatriz Williams book.

Cocoa Beach is a terrific beach read, a book to get lost in while you are lounging on your porch with a glass of iced tea. (The cover is gorgeous too.)

Beatriz Williams website is here.

Three Books About The Schuyler Women by Beatriz Williams

Reprinted from The Citizen

Often, fiction authors will write a series of books featuring the same characters; many mystery writers have made entire careers out this (like Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski books, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone series and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books).

Author Beatriz Williams has written a series of books that feature female members of the Schuyler family. In each book, a member of the Schuyler family has a prominent role, and other members pop in and out of the background.

In “A Hundred Summers,” Lily Dane is the main character in a story set in 1938 in Seaview, Rhode Island. Lily’s mother, Christine, and her Aunt Julie are the Schuyler women, born into a prominent and wealthy family. 

We see Lily as a young, naive college girl, with her longtime best friend Budgie, a high society girl who goes after what she wants, as she meets handsome Dartmouth college football star Nick Greenwald. They fall madly in love and plan to marry when tragedy tears them apart.

Eight years later at her family’s beach house in Seaview, Lily runs into Budgie and Nick, now married and staying the summer in Seaview. Lily is unmarried and spends most of her time with her much younger 7-year-old sister, and seeing Nick and Budgie together shakes up her world.

“A Hundred Summers” put me in mind of a 19th-century Jane Austen novel, with its handsome, brooding, honorable hero, the lovelorn but strong-willed leading lady, and a look into the lifestyle, manners and rules of the wealthy.

Williams’ next novel, “The Secret Life of Violet Grant,” begins in 1964 with college graduate Vivian Schuyler working hard to become a writer at a popular magazine. One day she receives a battered suitcase that belonged to her Great Aunt Violet Grant, someone she knew little about. 

What she does know is that Violet disappeared in Germany in 1914 after killing her husband and running off with her lover. No one in the family had seen or heard from her since then.

Vivian believes that this is a story she could write for the magazine that would be her big break.

Vivian’s story alternates with Violet’s story. Violet wants to be a scientist at a time when there were not many women scientists. She studies in England under a well-respected doctor and ends up marrying him.

Their marriage isn’t quite what Violet thought it would be, so she throws herself into her work. Violet and her husband end up in Berlin just as the events leading up to WWI are swirling around them.

“The Secret Life of Violet Grant” is my favorite of the three Schuyler women books so far. I love that Violet is a scientist, a unique career for a woman at that time. Even now, you don’t find too many female scientist protagonists in women’s fiction.

Vivian is a great character, too, a very Rosalind Russell/Kate Hepburn '40s movie type of gal. Her wisecracks and interactions with her sister Pepper and Aunt Julie made me smile.

In “Little Tiny Thing,” Christina “Tiny” Schuyler is married to a politician on the rise (John Kennedy comes to mind). She spends the summer of 1966 at her husband Frank’s family summer compound with her mother-in-law, who rules the roost with an iron-in-velvet fist, a father-in-law who is determined that his son will be president, and various other relatives. 

Two weeks before Tiny married Frank, she met a man at a diner and, after a violent holdup at the diner, she and this mystery man became more than friends. Tiny was ready to end her engagement to Frank when she discovered that her mystery man was not whom she thought he was.

Back at the compound, Tiny receives a compromising photo of herself in the mail. The attached note requests money or else the photo will be made public, and she will ruin Frank’s chances of becoming a Congressman.

Tiny turns to her sister Pepper, who has shown up at the compound on vacation from her job as an assistant to Sen. Robert Kennedy. Pepper and Tiny try to find out who the blackmailer is, and along the way restore a 1933 rare German car they find hidden on the property.

I loved Pepper in this story, described as looking “like trouble at any angle.” I hope that the next book in the series will give us Pepper’s story; I know it will be a fabulous one.

A Hundred Summers

The Secret Life of Violet Grant

Tiny Little Thing