The day his mother died, Jonathan Cooke understood what it meant to be completely alone in the world. On that awful day, when he buried his mother beside his father, he also understood the deep pain of deception. He was the only child of two orphans and had no other relatives, or so he thought… until he inadvertently discovered his mother's lies. This woman, who he had trusted completely, kept the most important things about his life, her secret. His birth father was alive, and so was her mother. With only meager clues from her past, Jonathan forged out on his own to untangle the legacy of lies his mother left him, and to find the family she had turned her back on, if they would have him. What he really needed to find was the only family that would love and accept him unconditionally, in The Beloved.

His mother's death was a crucial turning point in Jonathan Cooke's life, not only that it left him alone in the world with nowhere to go, but because it stripped him bare of the unshakable trust they'd forged together, when he realized that his mother was a liar. Jonathan discovered her legacy of lies in the throes of her illness, as she rambled on deliriously about a man he'd never heard mentioned before. He instinctively pressed his dying mother for answers, but the answers she gave were more devastating to him than the thought of her death. He had family he never knew about. The gut-wrenching truth was that her deathbed confession meant she had never planned to tell him that the life he thought he knew, was a lie, interwoven with deliberate deception and broken trust. The man on her mind in these last moments of her life, was his birth father who she implied knew her mother. Neither of these people knew her son existed. This new reality would send him on a blind quest to find, the only people he could call family, his birth father and his grandmother. In The Beloved Jonathan Cooke, is a family drama that explores the need we all have to love, and to be loved, unconditionally. Jonathan's personal journey touches many other lives as truths unravel, and decades old secrets and scandals are revealed. But it is his spiritual journey that helps him discover and define what love is all about.

BEVERLYN FRAY has been a fine artist, a film director, producer and editor, a graphic designer and most importantly, a writer. She has written articles, speeches, short stories and three feature-length screenplays. As a filmmaker in Los Angeles, California, her USC Graduate short film, “The Long Walk Home,” won her six national awards and was produced theatrically into a feature-length narrative film. She has worked in off-Broadway theater and event productions in New York City. She spent extended time in Africa where she filmed the humanitarian work being done for children and families who live in the slums of Kiambo in Nairobi, Kenya, the villages of Nyanza Kagan, Kenya and in Bujumbura, Burundi. During her time in Israel, she was able to document some of the thoughts and experiences of South Sudanese immigrant families being repatriated to their war-torn country.

Throughout her professional career, her travels abroad and her personal experiences, she has found a common thread and the recurring theme of families… fractured, needy, bruised, challenged, yet bonded. It is the importance of family that inspired her to write her first novel, In The Beloved Jonathan Cooke. Her creativity has had many outlets, but words and writing have always been the articulating quill of her imagination, and life is the ink. She has experienced the say-it of the theater, the show-it of film, and now with her first novel, she delves into the tell-it of prose.