Elizabeth Loupas

“Think The Other Boleyn Girl meets Rebecca…”

Wonderful advance comments for The Second Duchess! Pre-order now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, or your favorite independent bookstore.

“Rich in historical detail and all the dangerous grandeur of court life in Renaissance Italy. Think The Other Boleyn Girl meets Rebecca.” —C. S. Harris, author of the Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery series.

“I have rarely read a historical novel or mystery that I as fully, gladly inhabited as I did The Second Duchess. I felt actual regret as I neared its end because I did not want to part company with Elizabeth Loupas’ complex, engaging, intriguing characters. With their world created in deep, believable detail around them, they were true to their time and place, thereby taking me well out of mine, which is the ideal (and all too rare) accomplishment of any work of historical fiction.” —Margaret Frazer, double-Edgar-nominated author of the Dame Frevisse and Joliffe the Player mystery series.

“Utterly mesmerizing, captivating from the first page. Thick with shadowy court intrigues and lush period detail, The Second Duchess is a Renaissance masterpiece come to life.” —Deanna Raybourn, author of the forthcoming Dark Road to Darjeerling.

“The historical mystery at the heart of this excellent novel kept me turning pages late into the night even as I admonished myself to slow down and savor the feast for the senses laid out on each page. The historical details and warring political factions of Renaissance Italy were convincingly and elegantly delivered, the story compelling, and the voice utterly intriguing. Hard to believe such a finely-crafted tale is the work of a debut novelist.” —Brenda Rickman Vantrease, author of The Heretic’s Wife.

“I’ve always loved Robert Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’ and the way Loupas springboards from that is a delight. I can hear the voice of Browning’s duke in her Alfonso, and the way she departs from it into a mystery is very satisfying. The clothes, the manners, the food and decorations! She creates such a vivid sense of the magnificence of an Italian Renaissance court with her tissues of silver and braids of emeralds, silk stomachers and damascene daggers, candied angelica and rice pudding rolled in cinnamon; festivals, hunts, and balls all the more splendid because of the poisons and thumbscrews and murder going on underneath. Alfonso is fascinating…but Barbara is the jewel here. Her courage and candor seduce the reader as well as her enigmatic new husband. Applause for Elizabeth Loupas. I loved it.” —Cecelia Holland, author of The Secret Eleanor and one of my favorite books of all time, Great Maria.

“Both a fascinating literary mystery and a rich historical novel, The Second Duchess is a feast of vibrant characters and a lush setting. Elizabeth Loupas has opened for us a lost world of ducal power and decadence and yet made her resilient Renaissance heroine one that a modern woman can admire and root for. Bravo!” —Karen Harper, author of Mistress Shakespeare and the forthcoming The Irish Princess.

The Second Duchess, to be published in January 2011 by NAL and in spring 2011 by Rowohlt, takes as its jumping-off point Robert Browning’s much-studied and much-loved dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess.” In the poem, the urbane and cultivated Duke—based, according to Browning, on the historical Alfonso II d’Este, the fifth Duke of Ferrara—seems to reveal himself as a madman and the murderer of his first wife, even while coolly negotiating for a second wife to step into her shoes. In this carefully researched and re-imagined continuation of the poem’s story, nothing is quite that simple.

The narrator of the story is the Duke of Ferrara’s second wife, Barbara of Austria: sensible, quick-witted, and courageous enough—or desperate enough—to become the second Duchess of Ferrara despite whispers the Duke murdered his beautiful young first wife for nothing more than a smile or two. The glorious court of Ferrara offers literature, art, music, sport, gaiety, a way of life Barbara longs for with every fiber of her being, and she embraces it with delight—but soon she learns she cannot close her eyes and ears forever.

In a parallel narrative the murdered first Duchess speaks—beautiful Lucrezia de’ Medici, hardly more than a child, willful, sensual, and vengeful. Little by little, as she observes and comments on Barbara’s life, passions and dangers in Ferrara, she reveals her own truth about her life and death.