"When You Loved Me," Beatriz Williams - A Review

                                                                 Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

When You Loved Me, Beatriz Williams

July 6, 2026

 

“All is well.”

                                                                                 When you Loved Me, Beatriz Williams

Beatriz’s love of plays-on-words, knowledge of history and enthusiasm for mystery have made her novels best-sellers. In this, her fourth set on fictional Winthrop Island is strengthened by her familiarity with football, a function of four years as a manager of Stanford’s football team when she was a student.

As in all her stories, this one takes place along different time periods: the winter of 1717, the summer of 2012, and a dozen years later.

Cotton Mather, the colonial minister, referred to the four storms that struck New England over eleven days, between late February 1717 and early March, as “mighty a snow as perhaps has been known in the memory of man.” Beatriz brings color to that storm and its consequences in her depiction of Hephzibah, her sister Beulah and Beulah’s husband Silas Winthrop, and their relationship with the pirate Ned Ramsay and his shipmate Dr. Elliott. (Pirates did, in fact, raid islands off the coast of Connecticut to secure food and water.)

The heroine of the story is Lucy Cooper, who we meet in 2012 when she is eighteen. She spent summers on the island where her family lived on the “decayed” Cooper estate, site of Beulah and Silas’s home, and where a treasure reportedly is hidden. That summer of 2012 she meets and falls in love with Ben Ressler, a football star and classmate at Dartmouth of Sedge Peabody. His sister Laura, Lucy’s best friend, is also in love with Ben. The Peabody’s live on the Summerly estate, next door to the Cooper’s. (To help untangle the various families, Beatriz provides a genealogical table.) Sedge’s and Laura’s grandmother, Emelia Winthrop Peabody is a descendant of Beulah and Silas.

The heart of the story takes place a dozen years later. Her father, Boswell Cooper, has died mysteriously; so Lucy returns to the island after an absence of a dozen years, with her seven-year-old daughter Elise, known as “Punkin.” Her mother, Blythe, divorced from Boswell, had moved to France and then to England. Lucy is a 30-year-old widow when she returns. Ben, as we learn in the opening pages, had been playing professional football and is involved in a fatal accident. He is back on the island working as a caretaker at ‘Summerly,’ where his friend Sedge Peabody has given him a place to stay, away from the paparazzi.

Beatriz has a knack for connecting different time periods – a romance in one era is reflected in another – and for creating an exciting read. Whether it is a football game, a confrontation with pirates, the rescue of a swimmer, or describing a high school girls’ basketball game, the pages keep turning.

In this story, the most endearing character is “Punkin.” She is cute, alert, caring, precocious and out-spoken. I am sure we will read more about her in the future.

All is well.