Showing results by author "Carol Goodman" in All Categories

For Iris, he sudden impulse to write a piece about her mother leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime - and nestled inside is the sad story of her mother's death, a strange, untimely end in a fire 30 years ago. When Iris returns to the remote Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, the place where she grew up, to write her mother's biography and search for her mother's missing manuscript, she unravels a haunting mystery that threatens to envelope her.

Beneath layers of volcanic ash lies the Villa della Notte, home to first-century nobles, as well as to the captivating slave girl at the heart of an ancient controversy. And secreted in a subterranean labyrinth rests a cache of antique documents believed lost to the ages: a prize too tantalizing for classics professor Sophie Chase to resist.

Fifteen years ago, Maia Gold attended a prestigious—and very exclusive—writers retreat hosted by billionaire Argos Alexander on the Greek island of Eris. It’s where she wrote her first book, the one that should have launched a brilliant career. But something dark happened on that island, a betrayal that has hung over Maia ever since. Now, Maia finds a familiar envelope in the mail. It’s an invitation to return to Eris, and according to social media, she’s not the only one from that first retreat who’s been invited back. This could be the second chance Maia needs to jump-start her dreams.

Journalist Joan Lurie has written a seething article exposing a notorious newspaper tycoon as a sexual predator. But the night it goes live, she is brutally attacked. Traumatized and suffering the effects of a concussion, she moves into a highly secure apartment in Manhattan called the Refuge, which was at one time a Magdalen Laundry. Joan should be safe here, so how can she explain the cryptic incidents that are happening?

Alice gets off a bus in the middle of a snowstorm in Delphi, NY. She is fleeing an abusive relationship and desperate to protect Oren, 10 years old, a major Star Wars fan and wise beyond his years. Though Alice is wary, Oren bonds nearly instantly with Mattie, a social worker in her 50s who lives in an enormous, rundown house in the middle of the woods. According to protocol, Mattie should take Alice and Oren to a local shelter; instead, she brings them home for the night. What she doesn't say is that Oren reminds her of her little brother, who died 30 years ago at the age of 10.

Nan Lewis - a creative writing professor at a state university in upstate New York - is driving home from a faculty holiday party after finding out she's been denied tenure. On her way, she hits a deer, but when she gets out of her car to look for it, the deer is nowhere to be found. Eager to get home and out of the oncoming snowstorm, Nan is forced to leave her car at the bottom of her snowy driveway to wait out the longest night of the year - and the lowest point of her life....

Tess has worked hard to keep her past buried, where it belongs. Now she’s the wife to a respected professor at an elite boarding school, where she also teaches. Her 17-year-old son, Rudy, whose dark moods and complicated behavior she’s long worried about, seems to be thriving: He has a lead role in the school play and a smart and ambitious girlfriend. Tess tries not to think about the mistakes she made 18 years ago, and mostly, she succeeds.

Rose Asher can't shake the feeling: Robin Weiss, a talented and ambitious student, definitely reminds her of Bruno Brunelli, the man Rose came to love years ago during a semester in the Italian countryside. But soon Robin dies under mysterious circumstances and in a farewell letter directs his teacher to a library archive in Florence. Returning to the rustic Italian villa where she first met Bruno, Rose finds herself enmeshed in a web of secrets and scandal: a folio containing what some believe are lost sonnets by Shakespeare has mysteriously vanished.

At seventeen, Avaline Hall has already buried her mother, survived a horrific factory fire, and escaped from an insane asylum. Now she's on her way to Blythewood Academy, the elite boarding school in New York's mist-shrouded Hudson Valley that her mother attended - and was expelled from. Though she's afraid her high society classmates won't accept a factory girl in their midst, Ava is desperate to unravel her family's murky past, discover the identity of the father she's never known, and perhaps finally understand her mother's abrupt suicide.

When Daphne Marist and her infant daughter, Chloe, pull up the gravel drive to the home of Daphne's new employer, it feels like they've entered a whole new world. Tucked in the Catskills, the stone mansion looks like something out of a fairy tale, its lush landscaping hiding the view of the mental asylum just beyond its border. Daphne secured the live-in position using an assumed name and fake credentials, telling no one that she's on the run from a controlling husband who has threatened to take her daughter away.

In debt after her husband's unexpected death, Meg Rosenthal secures a job as a teacher at an upstate New York boarding school. Leaving suburban Long Island, Meg and her teenage daughter, Sally, embark on a new life in Arcadia Falls, a beautiful but isolated small town and the inspiration for a number of magically eerie fairy tales.

Lucy Harper still has traumatic memories and lingering health problems from the 2020 pandemic. So, when a new virus surfaces years later, she and her husband, Reed, seek refuge on his family’s private island off the coast of Maine. Ostensibly safely sequestered with their five closest friends and family, Lucy should feel at ease. So why does she feel the weight of the island’s dark history pushing down on the group?

When Jess and Clare Martin move from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to their former college town in the Hudson River valley, they are hoping for rejuvenation - of their marriage, their savings, and Jess' writing career. They take a caretaker's job at Riven House, a crumbling estate and the home of their old college writing professor. While Clare once had dreams of being a writer, those plans fell by the wayside when Jess made a big, splashy literary debut in their 20s. It's been years now since his first novel.

It’s been twenty-five years since the shocking disappearance of a female student and the distinguished Creative Writing professor who died while searching for her. When an alumna dies in a shockingly similar way to the story she wrote, and then another succumbs to a similar fate, they realize someone has decided at long last to avenge the crimes of the past. Will the secret of what they did twenty-five years ago be revealed? Will any of them be alive at the end of the weekend to find out?

Agnes Corey, a junior editor at a small independent publisher, has been hired by enigmatic author Veronica St. Clair to transcribe the sequel to her 1993 hit phenomenon, The Secret of Wyldcliffe Heights. St. Clair has been a recluse since the publication of the Jane Eyre-esque book, which coincided with a terrible fire that blinded and scarred her. Arriving in the Hudson Valley at St. Clair’s crumbling estate, which was once a psychiatric hospital for “wayward women,” Agnes is eager to ensure St. Clair’s devoted fans will get the sequel they’ve been anticipating for the past thirty years.

For more than 100 years, creative souls have traveled to the Bosco estate to live and work under its captivating spell. Novelist Ellis Brooks is writing a book based on the dark events that took place during the summer of 1893. All she knows is that the wealthy Milo Latham brought in a psychic medium to help his wife contact their three dead children - only to have the seance turn deadly and his remaining child abducted. As Ellis uncovers the Latham family's dark secrets, a series of bizarre accidents occurs.

Twenty years ago, Jane Hudson fled the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks after a terrible tragedy. The week before graduation, three lives were taken, all victims of suicide. Only Jane was left to carry the burden of a mystery that has stayed hidden for more than two decades. Now, Jane has returned as a Latin teacher, recently separated and hoping to make a fresh start with her young daughter. But ominous messages from the past dredge up forgotten memories. Once again, young, troubled girls are beginning to die.

Stained glass artist Juno McKay is forced to confront the events that shattered the intense friendship between herself, her best friend, Christine, and her husband, Neil, when she discovers, after years of absence, that Christine is to deliver a lecture at their college reunion. Despite her misgivings, Juno finds herself compelled to attend the lecture about the history of one of Penrose College's most hallowed works of art.

The day Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, four 13-year-olds converge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where an eccentric curator is seeking four uncommonly brave souls to track down the hidden pages of the Kelmsbury Manuscript, an ancient book of Arthurian legends that lies scattered within the museum's collection and that holds the key to preventing a second attack on American soil.

Avaline Hall is no ordinary girl. She's a student at Blythewood Academy, an elite boarding school that trains young women to defend human society from the shadowy forces that live among us. After the devastating events of her first year at Blythewood, Ava is eager to reunite with her friends - and with Raven, the compelling but elusive winged boy who makes her pulse race. She soon discovers, though, that the sinister Judicus van Drood hasn't finished wreaking havoc on Blythewood.