Joanna FitzPatrick was raised in Hollywood. She started her writing habit by applying her orange fountain pen and a wild imagination to screenplays, which led her early on to produce the film White Lilacs and Pink Champagne. Accepted at Sarah Lawrence College, she wrote her MFA thesis Sha La La: Live for Today about her life as a rock ’n’ roll star’s wife. Her more recent work includes two novels, Katherine Mansfield, Bronze Winner of the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) in Historical Fiction, and The Drummer’s Widow. The Artist Colony is her third book. FitzPatrick divides up the seasons between her Monterey Bay home in Pacific Grove, California, and a hameau in southern France where she begins all her new book projects.

It’s July 1924. Sarah Cunningham is preparing for her first solo art show in Paris when she receives the telegrammed news of her sister Ada’s unnatural death an ocean away—in Carmel, California. Sarah travels two weeks by ship and rail to attend the inquest, but arrives too late. The verdict is already in: death by suicide.

Sarah is astonished—and not at all convinced—by this finding. Ada was headstrong, erratic, passionate, and sometimes cruel, but she was also loving and kind. She was also at the very peak of her painting career: her seascapes were selling as swiftly as they were painted, and she was about to exhibit a series of portraits that would bring her even wider recognition.

Determined to investigate Ada’s death, Sarah ingratiates herself with the seaside artist colony of Carmel. Through getting to know Ada’s friends, her unusual assistant, and her untrustworthy art dealer, she begins to assemble the facts. From the posh Hotel del Monte to the windswept sands of Carmel Beach to Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House to Point Lobos’s Whalers Cove with its suspicious cargo landings and beyond, Sarah’s hunt for the truth teaches her how many secrets sisters can keep from each other—and how far a killer will go to keep her from knowing the truth.