Elizabeth Loupas Books in Order

Elizabeth Loupas grew up in Rockford, Illinois, with a lifelong love of stories, history, books, animals, and plants. Her own notes describe her as an introvert with a head full of stories, someone more at ease in one-to-one conversation than in a crowd.

Her route to fiction took a few turns. She worked in radio and television, and also held jobs as an editor, writer, and marketing consultant. She earned degrees in literary studies and library and information science, a fitting background for a novelist drawn to research, old documents, and the gaps history leaves behind.

History was always the subject that pulled her in.

Loupas has lived in several places, including North Carolina, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, New Mexico, and New Orleans. Her published biographical notes have placed her near the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, between Dallas and Fort Worth, with her husband and beagles. Gardens, popcorn, rescue dogs, and books are recurring parts of the picture she paints of home.

When she began writing fiction, historical settings came naturally. She has said that Barbara and Joanna of Austria, sisters whose state marriages took them into dangerous Renaissance courts, first sparked her interest in writing historical fiction. That curiosity became The Second Duchess, her 2011 debut. The novel puts Barbara of Austria in Ferrara, newly married to Duke Alfonso d'Este and hearing persistent rumors that he killed his first wife, Lucrezia de' Medici. Barbara's need to know what happened turns a court marriage into a perilous investigation.

The past, in these books, is never tidy.

Her next novel, The Flower Reader, moves to Scotland in the 1560s. Rinette Leslie has the family gift of reading signs in flowers, but that skill offers limited protection when she is given a casket full of royal secrets and her husband is murdered. The book combines court politics around Mary, Queen of Scots with a mystery, romance, and a light supernatural thread.

In The Red Lily Crown, Loupas returned to Italy, this time to Florence in 1574 as Cosimo de' Medici lies dying. Chiara Nerini, the daughter of an anti-Medici bookseller, is pulled into Prince Francesco's household after trying to sell alchemical equipment to support her family. Alchemy, fear, ambition, and palace conspiracies drive the story, while Chiara tries to find room to act on her own terms.

Across her novels, Loupas often writes about women navigating courts where rank, marriage, and reputation can decide their futures. Her heroines are observant and practical, but they are also forced to ask difficult questions in places where powerful people would rather keep secrets buried. Readers who like historical fiction with mysteries at its center will find Renaissance Italy and Reformation-era Scotland rendered as working, risky worlds rather than distant backdrops.

She has also written short fiction connected to each of her three novel settings. It suits an author whose interest in history seems to begin with one intriguing person or unanswered question, then keeps widening into a whole world.