Beverly Swerling Books In Order

Publication Order of Old New York Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Beverly Swerling
Beverly Swerling is a consultant, writer, and amateur historian. She grew up in the Boston suburb of Revere. In those days defined by having both a horse track and a dog track, and a bunch of gentlemen with binoculars doing sub rosa checks of the totes from assorted windows.

It was during this time that she learned early on that she could make people pay attention if she told stories. They were whoppers, which typically involved mysterious codes and secret caves, which Beverly insisted were true. Quickly she realized that if she left an episode at an exciting point everybody would come back for more.

Beverly went from an upstanding childhood to a tiny Catholic girls college in the Midwest, and on to a job in New York as a file clerk to support her writing, all of which was non fiction at first, until she was able to earn her way as a freelance journalist.

For a short time after that she lived in Europe. Where she got married for an unpleasant and short period, and then returned home and wrote some more non fiction. And she got married for a second time. Then she returned to Europe. Here she began writing writing fiction, and selling it.

Then she returned to New York with her long time husband, and started writing “City of Dreams”.

Her husband runs the world’s number one consultancy for authors looking for a new (or in some cases first) agents. Beverly does some of the work for his clients. She also sometimes mentors new (and some not so new) writers. What they’ve all got in common is a passion for what they are writing, so working with them gives her great joy, and many have it helpful.

“City of Dreams” is the first novel in the “City” series and was released in 2001. In 1661, Lucas Turner and Sally (his sister), stagger off of a tiny wooden ship after having spent eleven weeks at sea to make a new start in the rowdy and rough Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam. Lucas, who is a barber surgeon, while Sally is an apothecary, are each gifted healers and are bound to one another by necessity and blood.

But while their new lives unfold, things like betrayal, lust, and murder are going to make them deadly enemies. In their struggle to survive in the New World, each make decisions which will burden their descendants (dedicated surgeons and physicians, whoremasters and pirates) with a legacy of retribution and secrets. It’s a heritage that sets one cousin against another, surgeon against physician, and ultimately, Tory against patriot.

In a city where Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams all walk The Broad Way arguing America’s destiny, where slaves get burned alive on Wall Street, and where one of the greatest hospitals in the entire world is born in former shipwrights’ workshops by the East River, two families’ fortunes are inextricably entwined. Their ambition and pride, their hates and loves, and their willingness to live by their own rules is going to shape medicine’s future, and the becoming of the dream which is New York.

“Shadowbrook” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2004. Set against the bloody backdrop of the famously deadly French and Indian War, Beverly yet again tells a compelling, multilayered tale of colonial America. 1754. In a low lying glen located in the Ohio Country, where the English and the French each claim dominion, the very first musket ball gets fired to signal the beginning of the brutal 7 year long conflict that is destined to dismantle France’s overarching empire and pave the way for the American Revolution.

It’s here that Beverly introduces her unforgettable cast of characters. Cormac Shea, the part-Indian, part Irish woodsman with a foot in both worlds, sworn to drive away every white man from Canada. Quentin Hale, the fearless gentleman-turned-scout the Indians have dubbed Red Bear. And Nicole Crane, who, struggling to reconcile her love for Quentin and her calling to the convent, becomes a pawn in the British’s quest for more territory.

Cormac and Quentin were raised as brothers on Shadowbrook, this prosperous plantation out in the northern wilderness whose fertile land, which was worked by slaves, sits between Hudson’s River and the Adirondack Mountains. Even though they’re fiercely devoted to one another, they often find themselves on opposite sides of a fight, however not in this war, or in the struggle to wrest control of Shadowbrook from Quentin’s depraved big brother.

From the elegant rooms of Shadowbrook to Iroquois longhouses, from the cobbled streets of Quebec to the virgin forests of the frontier, Beverly weaves a story of bravery and betrayal, passion and intrigue, devotion and faith.

“Bristol House” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2013. A swiftly paced mystery which stretches from modern London all the way back to Tudor London.

Modern day London. Annie Kendall (a recovering alcoholic and architectural historian) hopes she can turn her life around and restart her career by locating long missing pieces of ancient Judaica. Geoff Harris (an investigative reporter) quickly gets drawn into this quest, both by suspicions about the head of the Shalom Foundation (the organization that is sponsoring her work) and romantic interest. The man’s also a dead ringer for the ghost of this monk that Annie believes she’s seen at the flat that she is subletting in Bristol House.

Tudor London, 1535. It’s a different city, one where monks are getting executed left and right by Henry VIII and Jews are getting banished. In this treacherous environment of religious persecution, Dom Justin (a Carthusian monk), and this goldsmith known as the Jew of Holborn have to navigate through a shadowy world of intrigue that involves Thomas Cromwell, sexual secrets, and Jewish treasure. Their struggles shed some more light on the mysteries that Geoff and Annie aim to puzzle out, at their own peril.

This riveting dual period narrative blends vivid historical fiction with haunting supernatural thriller. Beverly delivers an epic and bewitching story about a monk and a historian, half a millennium apart, whose own destinies are on a collision course.