"Cocoa Beach"

Sydney M. Williams

July 5, 2017

“Cocoa Beach”

Beatriz Williams

“The innocent ones always understand more than you think.”

                                                                                                            Beatriz Williams

Chapter 27, page 311

                                                                                                            Cocoa Beach  

A captivating aspect of Beatriz’s novels – reminiscent of Anthony Trollope – is how a minor character in one novel reappears in a major (or a minor) role in another. Virginia Fortescue Fitzwilliam had a minor role as the older sister of Sophie in A Certain Age; she returns in this novel as its heroine. Geneva (Gin) Kelly, a central character in The Wicked City, appears in a veiled scene at the end of Cocoa Beach.

Cocoa Beach, Beatriz’s eighth novel, is a story of romance, family, mystery, war (the First World War), murder, prohibition and rum-running. We follow Virginia, who left New York City in 1917 because of an oppressive father about whom she had doubts, to drive ambulances in France. There she meets Captain Simon Fitzwilliam, a surgeon in the British army, whom she marries in 1919 and with whom she has a baby. She leaves her husband for reasons readers will learn. Three years later, we meet her again in Cocoa Beach, Florida where she has gone, with her three-year-old daughter, as apparent heir to her estranged husband’s businesses. He appears to have died in what might not have been an accident. Death plays a role in the book, beyond the destruction she saw in France. Her mother, for example, had been murdered ten years earlier. “I came to understand that we living people exist in this physical realm, and the departed spirits belong solely to the eternal one.”

Beatriz brings alive the time-periods of which she writes – in this case, battle fields in France; England and France, victorious but exhausted by four years of war; and Florida, energetic and developing, and rife with rum-runners. She writes of how the modern era was born from the ashes of that world war, and she incorporates historical figures, like Carl Fisher, manufacturer of the acetylene headlight and developer of Miami Beach.

The novel twists and turns toward its surprising conclusion, leading all but the most astute readers astray, as we follow Virginia on her tortuous path toward answers. On the way, she learns hard truths: “You can do anything if you don’t care how other people feel.” Not knowing who or what to believe, she becomes self-reliant: “That I had only myself to rely on, in this unknown world that lay before me.”  “We do what we must to survive in this harsh and bitter universe.” The story is told in the first person and through a series of letters to Virginia from Simon.

Cocoa Beach tells of the struggle between good and evil, lies and truth, that things are not always what they seem. It is an entertaining and informative read.