The Beauclaire Isles Series
The Beauclaire Isles Series
A Free Beauclaire Isles Novella
One night on Beauclaire Isles. A charity gala, a marriage the whole island depends on, and a woman who quietly declines to perform. By sunrise the Isles have agreed on what her silence meant, and not one version of it is true.
Free, in your hands in about two minutes.
Silence of a Defiant Heart
The Night In Question
On Beauclaire Isles, the season opens with a gala. Four hundred people who have known each other for thirty years, one ballroom, and an unspoken agreement about who stands where.
Soraya has kept that agreement for years. She founded Laleh House. She raised the money, took the photographs, said the gracious thing at the right moment, and went home. It cost her something every time, and she paid it, because the arrangement worked.
Then, in January, her husband permits a room full of men to make a decision about her in her absence. He does not engineer it. He simply does not stop it. On the night of the gala, they want her to walk in and stand beside him as though nothing happened.
She stays in her chair.
What follows is not a scandal. It is quieter than that, and worse. An empty seat at a head table is a blank space, and a room like that one will fill a blank space with whatever story is most convenient. By morning there are four versions of Soraya on the island, and the woman herself is the only one nobody asks.
How It Opens
The novella begins with a small administrative act. Nobody argues about it. Nobody has to.
Her name is not removed. It is amended. The deposition arrives as a courtesy, converts her to Founder Emerita, and takes effect the moment she is seen accepting it. No signature is required. Presence is the signature.
That is the whole trick of the Isles, and the reason this island keeps producing women with stories nobody has heard.
Two Ways In
Same story, same ending, same price, which is none. Take whichever one you will actually finish this week.
Read It
Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, your phone, or straight in the browser. About a two hour read, with the opening of Book One bound in at the back.
Send me the ebook →Listen To It
The complete novella, narrated, for the commute or the kitchen. There is a sample on the next page if you would rather hear it before you commit.
Send me the audiobook →Free forever · No card, ever · Unsubscribe in one click
What You Are Getting
This is a finished novella with its own beginning, its own ending, and its own secret. You can read it and never read another word of the series, and it will still have been worth the evening.
Gala evening through to dawn, told in first person by the woman everyone is discussing and nobody is addressing.
Mirador, Morrow House, the Sovereign Key regatta, Vale Meridian. The places that come back in every book after this one.
The opening of Shadows of a Stolen Heart is bound into the ebook, so you meet Bee Hayes before the island does.
Occasional notes from Brielle on what is being written, what is coming, and how the Isles fit together. Leave whenever you want.
Read This If
Skip It If
Before You Decide
Really free, in both formats. There is no card field anywhere in this and no checkout waiting behind it. The novella is how new readers meet the series, which means it works best when nothing is standing in front of it.
Yes. Take one now, and if you want the other later, come back to this page and pick it. Nothing stops you having both, and nothing is charged either time.
A full story. Just under thirty thousand words, one night, resolved. In the ebook, the preview of Shadows of a Stolen Heart sits after the ending, so the novella never gets interrupted to sell you something.
No. Every book in the Beauclaire Isles Series stands alone, with its own cast and its own outcome. The novella is the exception that shares one character with Book One, so taking it first means you already know something about him that Bee Hayes does not.
Pick your format above and you land on a page that asks for your email and hands the book straight over, in whatever app you already read or listen in. No waiting for a delivery email before you can start.
Occasional letters from the island: what is being written, when the next book lands, and the odd piece of the world that did not fit in a chapter. One click removes you and nothing is held against you.
Upscale domestic suspense set on Beauclaire Isles, a fictional enclave of 4.83 square miles where every book unfolds inside the same calendar year. Each one gives up a secret and opens a new one. You would recognize the island. You would not recognize these people if you passed them at the boutique.
One Night, One Chair
Hers is the only one written down. Take it before Book One arrives on 29 September.