Beverly Swerling

a most excellent 5 star read. my head is full of information, that's a good thing!

Oh my gosh this was an excellent book and the definition of a literary thriller although…
isn't it redundant to call a book "literary" aren't all books by their very words literary…:)

This is the first but, not the last book I will read from this wonderful author Beverly Swerling. On her website about this book it says “A 21st century woman and a 16th century monk, Their destinies on a collision course – show more linked by a code that has defied solution for five hundred years” …wonderfully said!

This story was told in Modern day and 1535 Tudor London . There are ghosts, murderers, Jews, Christians, priceless artifacts, underground tunnels, a deranged madman, an unbreakable code, a love story or two and a special “waiting place” all in this wonderfully detailed mystery and history lesson!

Architectural historian Annie Kendall has somewhat of a shady past and is trying to restart her career so she takes on an assignment by The Shalom foundation that will take her to London where she has been hired to find some pieces of Judaica that have been lost somewhere in time by someone known only as “The Jew of Holborn” …
The Foundation puts her up in Bristol House where she starts to see and hear strange things. It seems there is an ancient ghostly Carthusian monk trying to communicate with her who looks exactly like the very handsome man and investigative reporter Geoff Harris that she had just met the evening before.
As Annie and Geoff both become more engrossed in this supernatural mystery, they embark on a deadly whirlwind of an exploration to try to figure out just what it is the Monk is trying to warn her about. show less

Rollicking Fun and Intrigue on the Streets of Old New York

City of Promise, fourth installment in Beverly Swerling’s acclaimed New York City saga, spans the time from the Civil War to the Gilded Age of the 1880s. The stories of the Turner and Devrey families continue. The book brims over with the city’s explosive expansion, gripping characters and a plot that highlights 19th century social mores. The book cover features fireworks over the newly erected Brooklyn Bridge, but the real show more sparklers are within its pages.

We have followed Beverly Swerling’s characters and their descendants through two centuries since the New York City saga began in City of Dreams. In this latest installment, Josh and Mollie Turner negotiate the ups and downs of their marriage almost as well as their dream to build “French flats,” leased one-floor apartments stacked into a high rise well north of the city. We sense a collision course will ensue with the project but seeing how it unfolds is revelatory. Along the way we bump into arsonists, brothel owners, real estate tycoons, blackmailers, kidnappers and spies.

The real star of City of Promise is New York itself. Swerling’s ability to cram period detail into an absorbing plot makes you feel you’re walking the city streets along with the characters. Grand mansions spread northward, subways threaten to run underground, and apartment buildings stretch skyward. Ride a steam-driven Otis elevator. Attend the opening of the Metropolitan Opera. Stay on top of events with the New York Times, an upscale newspaper. Learn about Edison’s improvements to the Bell telephone, steel-girded apartment buildings and a fashion revelation called the maternity dress.

Beverly Swerling loves New York, evidenced by her five superbly researched novels about its history. Her next novel (coming from Viking in 2013) is set in London in both Tudor and contemporary times. Several of her early books, originally published as written by Beverly Byrne and Beverly S. Martin, will soon be available as eBooks.

Swerling expertly creates fascinating characters that inform us of history. Her knowledge of New York City’s history and geography illuminates and concretizes her subject. City of Promise is so absorbing and suspenseful that when the last page is turned, the reader is unaware that he had a history lesson to top that of a college classroom.

No worries if you haven’t read the other books in the series, as the last one stands on its own. How refreshing to see authors take a different tack than in previous books. Swerling has upped her game in City of Promise. Instead of relying on surgical procedures and salacious scenes, she turns her beloved Big Apple into a hero. Intrigue and entertainment are its close friends to the last page. In this reviewer’s mind, it is the best book of the series.

Simon and Schuster graciously provided the review copy. The opinions expressed are unbiased and entirely those of the reviewer.

Reviewed by Holly Weiss, author of Crestmont show less

Prepare to be fascinated when you read this historical thriller toggling back and forth in time from present day England to the 16th century Tudor period. Some authors are content to continue on a path they know to be successful. Historical fiction novelist Beverly Swerling has taken a different tack by presenting Bristol House, successfully intertwining history, romance, the supernatural, and mysteries of religious relics.

Present day. Architectural historian Annie Kendall begins a three show more month research project in London to locate long missing artifacts for Shalom Foundation. Her assignment—“Find the Jew of Holborn.” If she can do that, she will discover the secrets and locations for specific ancient artifacts brought back to Europe from the Holy Land by the Knights Templar and find the connection between present and past. More so, successfully completing this assignment would give her back a sense of self worth and credibility in her professional life lost long ago before she walked into an AA meeting. Days after she moves into Bristol House for the three-month assignment, she meets Geoffrey Harris, dead ringer for the ghost she just met the afternoon before in the back room of the house.

1535. King Henry VIII is executing Carthusian monks from the London Charterhouse who oppose him replacing the pope as head of the church. Thomas Cromwell plays his intrigue with power. The Jew of Holborn distributes his relics. How is the monk whose ghost Annie saw connected to the Jew? If he continues his story, will he be able to save her from danger?

Swerling writes convincingly of the Tudor Period. She transports us to an enigmatic and treacherous world complete with codes to be broken, a mysterious mural with a secret, and back stories of the 16th century characters. The complex plot has many twists and turns. Readers must concentrate, but are given a huge pay-off at the end when the story coalesces into a mesmerizing journey through dark and mysterious corridors. Some sexual and gritty scenes pop up. The old style font used for the 16th century chapters is quite pleasing as are the maps of old London and Bristol House.

If you are looking for a light beach read, save Bristol House for another day. If you love history, intrigue and the supernatural, embrace this book as a history-stocked fascinating journey.

Reviewed by Holly Weiss, author of Crestmont show less

What Edward Rutherfurd did in one fat novel — tell the history of New York City through fiction (“New York,” 2009) — Beverly Swerling did in four fat novels. Her death in 2018 prevented her from continuing that history into the 20th century, assuming that was ever her intent.

Following “City of Dreams,” “City of Glory” and “City of God,” her 2011 novel “City of Promise” covers the period from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s, or the time when the Brooklyn show more Bridge was under construction. This was the Gilded Age, when those who made fortunes in business thanks to the war enhanced those fortunes, when immigrants flooded into the city and when, to accommodate the growing population and growing business, developers started building up as well as out.

The story centers on one of these businessmen, Joshua Turner, who came out of the war with a wooden leg that in no way slowed his ambition. His bright idea is to build multi-story apartment buildings for the middle class. His even brighter idea is to marry Mollie Brannigan, a sharp-as-a-tack Irish woman who, because she is over 20 (and still a virgin despite growing up in her aunt's brothel), has resigned herself to spinsterhood. She meets Joshua while working at Macy's.

Yet this is also the period when the Boss Tweed political machine is in power and when criminal gangs are exercising power of their own. Then there is a rival businessman who made life miserable for Joshua when he was a Confederate prisoner of war and is now willing to do anything, including kidnapping or killing Mollie, to claim Joshua's success as his own.

Those in Joshua's corner include a resourceful dwarf who knows how to make steel, Mollie's aunt whose business has provided her with many valuable contacts in the business world, and a pawnbroker who seems to know everything going on in New York but whose true loyalty remains in doubt until the end.

Swerling makes New York history an important part of her story while at the same time keeping it in the background, so readers may not even realize they are learning anything. show less