The Golden Hour: A Novel

Beatriz Williams

Jul 2019 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

“The Golden Hour is pure golden delight Beatriz Williams is at the top of her game.” —Kate Quinn, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Alice Network

Beatriz Williams, the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives, is back with another hot summer read; a dazzling epic of World War II in which a beautiful young “society reporter” is sent to the Bahamas, a haven of spies, traitors, and the infamous Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The Bahamas, 1941. 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?

Or so Lulu imagines. But as she infiltrates the Duke and Duchess’s social circle, and the powerful cabal that controls the islands’ political and financial affairs, she uncovers evidence that beneath the glister of Wallis and Edward’s marriage lies an ugly—and even treasonous—reality. In fact, Windsor-era Nassau seethes with spies, financial swindles, and racial tension, and in the middle of it all stands Benedict Thorpe: a scientist of tremendous charm and murky national loyalties. Inevitably, the willful and wounded Lulu falls in love.

Then Nassau’s wealthiest man is murdered in one of the most notorious cases of the century, and the resulting coverup reeks of royal privilege. Benedict Thorpe disappears without a trace, and Lulu embarks on a journey to London and beyond to unpick Thorpe’s complicated family history: a fateful love affair, a wartime tragedy, and a mother from whom all joy is stolen.

The stories of two unforgettable women thread together in this extraordinary epic of espionage, sacrifice, human love, and human courage, set against a shocking true crime . . . and the rise and fall of a legendary royal couple.

Ratings and reviews

I am a fan of this author; but not so much this book. It’s an imaginative and fanciful plot, based loosely around an unsolved murder that took place during World War II in the Bahamas. If you need a memory jog, that was when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were living in the Bahamas. This is another one of those books that using a plot device that seems to be SO WIDELY used now, by SO MANY authors, that completely annoys me. Basically, the book is chunked into sections that represent different time periods, in different locations, and the complete story doesn’t come together until the very end. In the interim, the reader must keep track of plot lines and characters from 1900, 1941, 1943, 1905, 1942, 1916, 1944, and finally, 1951 in the Bahamas, Florida, London, Germany, Switzerland, and Scotland. So I found myself continually looking back to try to figure out whether the chapter I was about to read came before or after a previous chapter about these same characters. AARRRGGHH! To me it’s jarring to do so much skipping around and did NOT seem essential to building suspense in the overall plot. While the unsolved murder is real, the central protagonist is fictional. Lulu, recently widowed (though not because of the war), is trying to make a living writing a gossip column about the Windsors and their life in the Bahamas. While mixing in with the wealthy set that surrounds the Windsors, Lulu meets a man whose work is war-related but mysterious and, not surprisingly, love blossoms. She also meets the people who will ultimately be involved in the murder but that is NOT a big part of the central plot. Then we delve into the back story of this man’s family, particularly the tragic love story of his parents. There are spies, Nazis, illegitimate siblings, mental illness, and dysfunctional family relationships. It’s a reasonably interesting story. Just much more difficult to follow than is necessary.

About the author

Beatriz Williams is the bestselling author of over a dozen novels, including The Beach at Summerly, Our Woman in Moscow, and The Summer Wives, as well as four other novels cowritten with Lauren Willig and Karen White. A native of Seattle, she graduated from Stanford University and earned an MBA in finance from Columbia University. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.