Hello!
You've just opened the door to something fantastically different and mind-blowingly cool! 
Here's why...

Tintagel Castle, the ancient ruin, Cornwall.

                                                               
I really love ancient history and writing  adventure stories... and being a bit of an old adventurer and explorer myself, my books are very down to earth, true to life, exciting and realistic. That means no wizards or magic spells and definitely no morphing werewolves or killing teens. Just good, believable, exciting, realistic stories with a backdrop of ancient history, archaeology and characters that we can relate to and get to know well. Each book is set in a different part of the world, and we experience with the four young teens in the books, the workings of a dig and the fascinating artifacts that are unearthed. But don't let that fool you.. these are exciting adventures, and there's more to them than seeing what amazing things are excavated... in fact, that's only the tip of the iceberg.  

In The Obsidian Mask, four young teens, Natasha and Alex, siblings from the heart of London, and Lorenzo and Gabriella, from a valley near Piacenza, just south of Milan, first meet while visiting their archaeologist parents on their dig in the hot, Middle Eastern desert. 

Natasha and Alex have just flown from London for the holidays to join their mother, Julia, who is working on the recently discovered tomb of an ancient Mesopotamian warrior Queen. They have unearthed, along with skeletons and amazing artifacts, her incredible death mask, carved out of a solid piece of jet black obsidian. Pretty interesting stuff in itself, you might think, as we learn with Natasha and Alex little about the Queen, the workings of the dig and why the Queen's thriving city disappeared beneath the sands thousands of years ago. But while Natasha and Alex are there, they meet two Italian teens, Gabriella and Lorenzo, also brother and sister, who's father happens to be Marcello, the flamboyant, larger-than-life director of the dig.
Natasha really doesn't like Lorenzo an Gabriella too much, for reasons you will soon find out (there is an underlying storyline that runs through the books), but the four are suddenly thrown together under quite unexpected and frightening circumstances... Now their first exciting holiday really begins, and the four embark on a thrilling  adventure that will tie them together, in more ways than one...

---

          Book trailer for The Obsidian Mask...enjoy!

I think you'll really enjoy these books... 
"Archaeology doesnt have to be make-believe! It 's exciting enough without those silly special effects!"

They're different from anything you will ever find on bookshelves, anywhere. You will feel like you are there, on a real excavation! You will find out with Natasha and Alex, Gabriella and Lorenzo things that you might not have heard about before. Though that isn't really the point of the books,  what's the harm in reading a really cool, exciting adventure and coming away a little more in the know! You can see what some readers thought about it in the 'REVIEWS' menu above.
 
If you would like to read the synopsis, to see what the story-lines are of the books, click under 'books'. But be warned, don't read them if you don't want the 'spoiler! 

 The second book, Secrets of the River, is based in Northern Italy.  A few months have passed and Natasha and Alex are staying with Lorenzo and Gabriella in their ancestral villa in the Trebbia Valley for the summer holidays. It is seeped in fascinating, and sometimes, as Natasha and Alex find out, rather horrible history. Hannibal of Carthage, the young General who did the impossible, marching his enormous army, a cavalry of Nubian horsemen and even elephants of war over the Alps, killed quite a few thousand Roman soldiers at the exact spot in the Trebbia River which overlooks Gabriella and Lorenzo's home.
With an uncanny feeling that they are being watched at the villa, and some very strange goings on, the four young teens gladly travel down to Tuscany for a change of scenery to visit Marcello and Julia at their fascinating excavation site in Pisa. Not far from the Leaning Tower, Marcello is unearthing an amazing cache of ancient Etruscan ships buried in layers of silt beneath the town's railway station. However the young teens begin to uncover something much more recent and closer to home than Etruscan ships and leaning towers; something that they should perhaps have left well alone.
From stolen art hidden by Nazi's during WW11, to a disappearing old gardener at the villa, they learn that the Contessa, Lorenzo and Gabriella's extremely arrogant grandmother, has a little more to hide than the average Italian grandmother, and the four young teens learn the hard way that some secrets are sometimes best left hidden, especially if someone's true identity is on the line... 

 In the third book, The Irish Queen of Algiers, the two families have flown to North Africa as Marcello is lecturing in Algeria on the importance of preserving the old forts and palaces that are rapidly crumbling away with neglect, and disappearing beneath the encroaching desert sands. But while visiting  one of these palaces, feeling tired and a little bored, quite by chance,  Natasha stumbles across something very strange; a cracked, stone sarcophagus in the centre of one of these old, dilapidated, palace courtyards, with another, smaller one next to it. But stranger than that, when she looks at the writing on the side, she is perplexed and confused to read the name, 'Catherine'. Not the kind of name one would expect to be engraved on the side of anything in the grounds of a North African palace. 
And so the four adventurers embark on a trail that will lead them from the desert ruins of Algeria to a  small town in southern Ireland, following the journey of this young girl, snatched from her Irish coastal fishing village in the 1600's by Barbary pirates, and sold at market into slavery...  

I will be posting ‘sneak peeks’ of all three books, which can be little tricky, as I don’t really want to give too much away so as to spoil it for you, but I think you can handle it...
Aside from the Obsidian series, I have also written several short stories, the first of which, The Clearing,  is now available directly from me if you email me through the website. As it is a little booklet of 45 pages, I am selling it to those who write to me at info@carolineludovici.com. I will send a signed copy to you personally. The synopsis of the Clearing is on the drop-down menu, under 'BOOKS'. It is a story that will get you thinking about what you would do if you were the boy in the story with a decision to make that could change the world for better or worse...

Please feel free to ask questions about the books, I look forward to hearing from you. It is great to be in touch with my readers! Here's the email; info@carolineludovici.com.

Enjoy!

Caroline 

P.S. Did you know, that for every copy of  The Obsidian Mask  sold, a tree will be planted to replace the one that was chopped down to make it? Together we will doing a great thing for the environment. I think that's pretty cool, don't you?

---

For every copy of the Obsidian Mask sold, a tree will be planted through Eco Libris, working towards sustainable reading

coming soon. Book 2, (this is not the cover I will use)

The very sweet short story in booklet format

The first of the trilogy available now, see purchase info page!