“Murder at Beacon Rock”

Welcome to Museum Reads, the Newport Art Museum’s Art-Themed book group for adults. We meet monthly, at the Museum and virtually, for discussion, and frequently are joined by the author.

Join us for a fan favorite, Alyssa Maxwell!

In June 1900, reporter Emma Cross discovers the body of a woman in the waters below the Morgans’ mansion, which threatens to send members of Newport’s high society floundering . . .

As a reporter, Emma is used to covering Newport’s social events. But this time she is appearing on the arm of her fiancé, Derrick Andrews, at a small but exclusive gathering of the New York Yacht Club at Beacon Rock, the Grecian-inspired summer “cottage” of Edwin and Elizabeth Morgan. The members—which include cousin and Yacht Club Commodore John Pierpoint Morgan and widow Lucy Carnegie, the first woman to be admitted to the Club—are there to discuss their strategy for the next America’s Cup Challenge, to be held in New York Harbor the following summer.

But it’s Emma who must come up with a strategy when she discovers a woman’s body bobbing against one of the hulls of the boats moored at the base of Beacon Rock. Is it possible she fell from the Newport ferry and was carried by the tide? Or could she have drowned herself or fallen victim to foul play?

After the woman is identified as the missing daughter of a yacht designer, the police—with the exception of Emma’s friend Detective Jesse Whyte—hastily conclude she is a suicide, perhaps to quiet any scandal for the Morgans, since her body was found floating near their property. But Emma suspects the woman was murdered and begins to sort through a who’s who of sportsmen, boat crews, and the Newport elite in search of a stone-cold killer . . .

Museum Reads Notes:
Be sure to register to receive email updates and Zoom links.
For last minute registrations, please call the front desk for the Zoom link at 401-848-8200.

Alyssa Maxwell is the author of the acclaimed series, The Gilded Newport Mysteries, and A Lady and Lady’s Maid Mysteries. Growing up in New England and traveling to Great Britain fueled a passion for history, while a love of puzzles drew her to the mystery genre. It has been the city of Newport, however, that has most inspired her writing with its rich historical and cultural diversity.  Although they still consider Newport home, she and her husband reside in Florida, where Alyssa is a member of the Mystery Writers of America-Florida Chapter, Sisters in Crime, and the South Florida Fiction Writers.

Alyssa Maxwell began a love affair with the city of Newport while visiting friends there back in her high school days. Time and again the narrow lanes and harbor‑side, gas‑lit neighborhoods drew her to return, and on one of those later visits she met the man who would become her husband. Always a lover of history, Alyssa found that marrying into a large, generations‑old Newport family opened up an exciting new world of historical discovery. From the graveyards whose earliest markers read from the seventeenth century, to original colonial houses still lived in today, to the Newport Artillery Company whose curator for many years was her husband’s grandfather, Newport became a place of fascination and romantic charm. Today, Maxwell and her husband reside beneath the palms and bright skies of Florida, but part of her heart remains firmly in that small New England city of great significance, a microcosm of American history spanning from before the Revolution through the Civil War, the Industrial Age, the Gilded Age, and beyond.