The Semper Sonnet
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A long-lost manuscript may reveal the past—or destroy the future—in “a wildly imaginative thriller that fans of Dan Brown and Steve Berry will love” (Phillip Margolin, New York Times–bestselling author).
Lee Nicholson is ready to take the academic world by storm, having discovered a sonnet she believes was written by William Shakespeare. But when she reads the poem on the air, the words put her life in peril and trigger a violent chase—with stakes that reach far beyond the cloistered walls of academia.
Buried in the language of the sonnet, in its allusions and wordplay, are secrets that have been hidden since Elizabethan times, secrets known only to the queen and her trusted doctor, but guessed at by men who seek the crown and others who seek the world. If the riddles are solved, it could explode what historians know of the great Elizabeth I—and release a terrifying pandemic.
Lee’s quest for the answers buried in the sonnet keeps her one step ahead of an international hunt—from the police who want her for murder, to a group of men who will stop at nothing to end her quest, to a madman who pursues the answers for destructive reasons of his own.
As this intelligent thriller moves back and forth between Tudor England and the present day, Lee begins to piece together the meaning behind Shakespeare’s words, carrying the story to its gasp-out-loud conclusion.
“Imaginative plotting and depth of character distinguish this centuries-spanning thriller.” —Publishers Weekly
“Will have you on the edge of your seat . . . a roller-coaster ride of a book.” —C. W. Gortner, international-bestselling author of The Last Queen
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Imaginative plotting and depth of character distinguish this centuries-spanning thriller from Margolis (Disillusions), despite its broad similarities to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. During a weekend in Grantham, Mass., Lee Nicholson, a graduate student in English literature at Columbia, buys an old book of Elizabethan love poems. Inside the volume is a slip of paper on which is written what appears to be an unknown Shakespeare sonnet. The morning after she's interviewed on TV in Manhattan about this exciting discovery, she goes out for coffee. When she returns to her Upper West Side apartment, she finds the cameraman from the TV show, with whom she spent the night, shot to death in her bed. In addition, her things are disturbed, possibly by someone looking for a copy of the poem. After Lee becomes the cops' prime suspect in the cameraman's murder, she flees to England on the track of a clue hidden in one of the stanzas in particular, to Henford Manor, which was visited by Elizabeth I in the 16th century. The story line takes some highly unexpected turns, and Margolis pulls off twists that could have been risible in the hands of a lesser writer.
