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Topic: Search for Carol Goodman

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Subject: Search for Carol Goodman
Date Posted: 3/12/2009 7:16 PM ET
Member Since: 2/19/2008
Posts: 9
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Supposedly Carol Goodman authored a book titled The Little Mysteries.  Everytime I try the ISBN or title, The Night Villa pops up.  The two books are listed separately on bookfinder.com and on AllBookstores.com, and the two books have different ISBN numbers.  Anyone know if these books are the same, or am I missing something? 

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Date Posted: 3/13/2009 2:14 PM ET
Member Since: 1/4/2006
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Bookreporter.com has an interview with her; from 6/22/07; this is from it:  "BRC: What are you working on now, and when can readers expect to see it?
 
CG: A novel called THE LITTLE MYSTERIES (at least that's its title now!). It's also set in Italy --- but this time in the south, around the Bay of Naples. A classics professor goes to Herculaneum to find a papyrus scroll that was buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. The story involves a first-century female slave who sued to gain her freedom (based on the real case of Petronia Iusta), an ancient mystery rite, and a modern-day cult. I had to travel to Naples and Capri for this one, causing much eye-rolling from my daughter.

Click here now to buy this book from Amazon."

 

The link takes you to a book called The Sonnet Lover; this is the book description they have listed: "Goodman (The Ghost Orchid) turns to Shakespeare for the plot of her fifth novel, with mixed results. Rose Asher, Hudson College Renaissance poetry professor, returns to La Civetta, the Italian estate-turned-academic retreat where, as a college student 20 years earlier, she had the romance of her life with married professor Bruno Brunelli. He's still there, but this time Rose has come as an adviser on a film inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets and the mysterious "Dark Lady" therein. The script, which includes an unattributed Shakespeare-like sonnet (taken from a manuscript found at La Civetta), is by one of Rose's star pupils, Robin Weiss, who soon dies in a possibly suicidal accident. The manuscript has vanished, but the sonnet seems to suggest that Ginevra de Laura, the 16th-century daughter of a master mosaic artist who worked at the estate, may be its author—and Shakespear's Dark Lady. Multiple plots and subplots revolve around the manuscript's recovery, Robin's death, the film, Rose's clandestine relationship with college president Mark Abrams, Bruno's presence and worries that Bruno's son, Orlando, may be a murderer. Goodman makes a plausible fictional case for Ginevra's crossing paths with Shakespeare and ably recreates the present and past Italian countryside. Nevertheless, dizzying crisscrosses, love triangles and rampant political machinations surrounding La Civetta's ownership obscure an intriguing solution to the lingering Dark Lady mystery. (June)"

 

 

Same book - Little Mysteries,and The Sonnet Lover......I don't know. This is quite a "little mystery."

 

Now, Amazon's description of The Night Villa is this:  "In this complex and lyrical literary thriller from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover), University of Texas classics professor Sophie Chase, after barely surviving a gunman with ties to a sinister cult, joins an expedition to Capri. A donor has funded both the exact reconstruction of a Roman villa destroyed when Mount Vesuvius buried nearby Herculaneum in A.D. 79, and a computer system that can decipher the charred scrolls being excavated from the villa's ruins. Sophie's hopes for a recuperative idyll fade after her old boyfriend, who disappeared years before into the same cult as the campus gunman, appears in the area, implicating the cult in a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, extracts from the scrolls—the journals of a Roman visiting the villa just before the volcano erupted—shade toward bloodshed and betrayal. The scrolls' oddly modern tone aside, Goodman deftly mixes cultural and religious history, geography, myth, personal memory, dream and even portent without sacrificing narrative drive, against the beautiful backdrop of the locale with its echoes of unimaginable loss. 5-city author tour.(Sept.)"

 

So, I think Little Mysteries became The Night Villa....



Last Edited on: 3/13/09 2:18 PM ET - Total times edited: 1