Black Swan Historical Romance Series

The Black Swan series is a trilogy of historical romance novels written by author Carolyn Brown, perhaps best known for her Spikes & Spurs series of cowboy-themed romances. Three Black Swan books—Pushin’ Up Daisies (2009), From Thin Air (2009), and Come High Water (2010)—were published by Avalon Books of New York. The series centers upon the three O’Shea sisters—Catherine, Alice, and Bridget—who now run the Black Swan Hotel in the timber town of Huttig (Union County) after their parents, Irish immigrants Patrick and Ella O’Shea, perished in the influenza epidemic in 1918.

The first book opens with Little Rock (Pulaski County) private detective Quincy Massey in Huttig searching for the recently disappeared Ralph Contiello of El Dorado (Union County). Quincy suspects one or more of the three O’Shea sisters in the disappearance, given that Bridget, the youngest and Ralph’s wife, regularly suffered his abuse. Angry that she left him to be at her mother’s death bed, Ralph had shown up at the hotel shortly after Ella’s funeral, and the sisters tell Quincy that they chased him off with a gun. However, in reality, Bridget shot at Ralph when he came to the hotel, causing him to fall down the stairs and break his neck. Catherine hatched a plan whereby Alice dressed in Ralph’s clothes and drove back to the Commercial Hotel and then walked back to the Black Swan. All three sisters later buried him atop the fresh grave of their mother.

As Quincy investigates the case, he and Catherine find themselves attracted to each other. After staying in town a few weeks and getting nowhere in his investigation, Quincy receives a telegram from his father removing him from the Contiello assignment and instead requiring him to take a position as supervisor at the local sawmill and keep an eye out for unrest in the face of downsizing—an assignment that comes with another agent, his cousin Elizabeth, pretending to be his wife. This causes a minor stir in town, although Elizabeth privately reveals the reality of their situation to Catherine. When the layoffs at the plant start, and Quincy is “fired” from his new job, Elizabeth writes to the sisters from Little Rock with a story for public consumption: her first husband had been mistakenly reported killed during World War I and had returned, and her marriage with Quincy would be annulled (foreshadowing the plot of From Thin Air). After Bridget’s divorce is finalized, and her maiden name restored, the sisters let it be known that she is expecting a baby.

Quincy invites Catherine to travel with him to his family’s vacation house in Avalon Beach, Florida, and they take the train together. However, he remains troubled by his continued belief that Catherine knows more about Ralph’s disappearance than she lets on. Three family friends—Connie, Midge, and Birdy—tell him, “Quincy, the past is the past. Forget it and go on to the future.” Quincy later proposes to Catherine, and they plan to head back to Arkansas for the wedding before setting off for Galveston, Texas, for his next assignment.

From Thin Air begins with Ira McNewel, Catherine’s former fiancé who was mistakenly reported killed during the war, returning to Huttig to find Catherine married and gone, his parents dead and their house reallocated to another sawmill family, and no jobs available at the local mill. Alice, who now runs the Black Swan (and has long been considered the “simple” one of her three sisters), gives him a job as a handyman until Christmas. As she later confesses, “I want him to be around so I can see if this feeling I’ve had since I was ten years old is real,” but she soon realizes that two other hotel guests, Dottie and Sadie, also have their eyes on Ira as potential husband material. Catherine’s brief return for two weeks makes the situation awkward, but they eventually confess to each other that they never had any real feelings for one another.

Alice, while visiting the local cemetery, suffers a concussion after a storm whips up and knocks a tree down on her. As she recovers, Baxter Wright, a conman passing through the area, begins courting her and proposes marriage, hoping to set himself up as the owner of her hotel. After kissing Baxter and feeling nothing, Alice decides that she needs to kiss Ira for comparison. She tells Bridget afterward that it was wonderful but that she intends to marry Baxter, saying that if Ira “ever raised a hand to hit me, I couldn’t shoot him, Bridget. I could never harm a single hair on that man’s head, I love him so dang much. So he can’t be my husband. Baxter can. Because if he ever hit me like Ralph did you, I could shoot him and never think twice about it.” However, when Baxter hears from Dottie that Alice is not rich, he runs off with Dottie instead. The next Sunday, Bridget gives birth to a daughter, Ella.

Ira later receives word from his grandmother in Grace, Mississippi, that his grandfather has died and that she is deeding the farm to Ira, whom she wants to return soon to help bring in the crop. In Mississippi, Ira learns how to manage the farm from Will, a Black farmhand (who makes reference to the Elaine Massacre of 1919 as a recent event). While he is away, a rich family passes through town from New York to New Orleans, Louisiana, and one of the sons, Cyrus Rosenthal, becomes smitten with Alice and proposes to her. Ira finally decides to return to Huttig and confess his feelings, but when he arrives, the town is preparing for a wedding at the Commercial Hotel between—Ira is told—“that Rosenthal man” and a bride who “was sweet on you for a while.” Ira assumes Alice is getting married and immediately returns to Mississippi. When he wakes the next morning, Alice is in his kitchen frying eggs, and she tells him that it was Sadie and Lester Rosenthal getting married. All misunderstandings soon cleared, Ira proposes, and they are married the following day.

The third book opens with Bridget, now managing the Black Swan alone, going to the train station to try to find a man “with great big feet” to work for her after encountering a huge rat in the hotel. At the station, she finds Wyatt Ferguson, who is heading home to Alvord, Texas, and offers him a job helping to run the hotel. On a business trip to El Dorado, with Wyatt in tow, Bridget has a nasty encounter with her former mother-in-law, and then Wyatt realizes that a man is following them around town. Back in Huttig, Bridget is showing all the symptoms of influenza, and the doctor has the Black Swan quarantined for three weeks, telling Wyatt to take care of her and Ella. She recovers after the first week, but they still must continue with the quarantine and clean every surface in the hotel before the doctor will allow it to be reopened.

As she and Wyatt work and live together, Bridget, who had intended to avoid the company of men the rest of her life, finds her attitude changing: “Without wanting to or even knowing when it happened, she trusted Wyatt Ferguson.” However, she later confronts him about letters he has been receiving from his mother, written on fancy stationery, and he tells her that his family is actually quite wealthy in Texas, operating general stores and with holdings in railroads and oil, and that he initially took the job at the Black Swan to avoid returning home in time for the impending wedding of his best friend, Harry, to a woman named Ilene, with whom Wyatt was himself in love. He also tells her that he hopes to convince his family to place an office in Healdton, Oklahoma, from which he can run their oil business.

Ilene shows up on the same day the doctor arrives to check on Bridget, telling Wyatt that she had left Harry for a man named Arty but wanted to see if Wyatt still had feelings for her before she committed herself. However, there still being a week left on quarantine, the doctor orders Ilene to stay at the Black Swan, and Bridget gives her the ultimatum of either working for her keep or having the sheriff called so that she can quarantine in the county jail. Ilene hopes to secure Wyatt for her own, but his prior infatuation with her is at an end.

At the end of quarantine, both Ilene and Wyatt leave. Two weeks later, with her cook Allie Mae and new employee Orville settling in, Bridget goes on a trip to visit Alice and Ira. After she returns to the hotel, Wyatt shows up and proposes marriage. She agrees and decides to sell the hotel to her friends Lizzy and Roy and move to Healdton.

The series ends with an epilogue set in the spring of 1960 with the three sisters returning to Huttig to visit the grave of their parents (and Ralph). The hotel, having been sold several times in the interim, has been torn down, but the three sisters remain happy in their respective lives.

Publishers Weekly praised the small-town setting of the first book but described it as suffering from “weak dialogue” and “sedate archetype leads.” Booklist said of From Thin Air, “Brown’s entertainingly gossipy second installment…continue[s] to develop her lively smart historical romance series.”

For additional information:
Brown, Carolyn. Come High Water. New York: Avalon Books, 2010.

———. From Thin Air. New York: Avalon Books, 2009.

———. Pushin’ Up Daisies. New York: Avalon Books, 2009.

Review of Pushin’ Up Daisies. Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780803499461 (accessed November 8, 2024).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas