Welcome to My Website
Hello. I'm Carol Smilgin. Thank you for visiting my website.
My second novel, "Provenance", was published in 2011 and is still available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the iUniverse website and local bookstores. It has won two Honorable Mentions—one for "Genre Based Fiction" at the Los Angeles Book Festival, and the other for "Romance" at the New York Book Festival.
PROVENANCE is a historical novel . . . a true tale of suspense that plays out on an international scale.
View the book trailer here!
According to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, provenance means "origin, source, the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature." Both Rebecca and her husband, Jeffrey, were significant art collectors, and on his death, Rebecca inherits several paintings that had once belonged to Jeffrey's grandfather. Two, however, have incomplete provenances.
Rebecca enlists the help of Georges Lartigues—a provenance expert from Paris—who begins mapping out a plan to solve the mystery. Along the way, he is joined by David Neville. David is not only a New York art dealer, but the "David" with whom Rebecca had a brief affair (her first) following college graduation ten years before the story opens.
At the prodding of Interpol, Rebecca agrees to search for a list Jeffrey reportedly kept of art dealers and gallery owners who continue to profit from the illegal sale of art works confiscated by the Nazi's during WWII.
The trail takes them to Belgium, Holland and France, across the Bay of Biscay to the art galleries in Madrid, through the salons of Lisbon and Paris and to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. But just as George finds the key to the missing piece of the puzzle, Rebecca realizes that the same people who killed her husband are out to kill her too.
I hope you enjoy reading the book. I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave a message on my blog.