Diana Biller

Diana Biller went to law school, and has said she spent her clerkships writing romance in the law library. Her first novel, The Widow of Rose House, appeared from St. Martin's Griffin in 2019: New York in 1875, where the widowed Alva Webster buys a decaying Hyde Park mansion named Liefdehuis to record its restoration for a decorating book, and enlists Professor Samuel Moore, an inventor curious about the ghosts said to be in it. The Brightest Star in Paris, from 2021, moves to 1878 and to Amelie St. James, prima ballerina of the Paris Opera Ballet, seven years after the siege of the city; Benedict Moore, a doctor and brother of the earlier inventor, reappears from her past. Hotel of Secrets, from March 2023, is set during ball season in nineteenth-century Vienna, where the hotelkeeper Maria Wallner crosses paths with Eli Whittaker, an American sent to find who is selling his country's codes.