A diva and a showman work together to make history, finding romance along the way After Queen Victoria, Jenny Lind is the most famous woman in Europe. A Swedish soprano with a voice like an angel’s and a temperament to match, she is in Vienna when she meets the shortest man she has ever seen. General Tom Thumb is a three-foot-tall sensation whom P. T. Barnum has made one of the wealthiest men in the world. Thumb arrives with a message from Barnum offering Lind more money than she has ever dreamed of, to do something she has never done before: perform in America. While Lind makes her way across the Atlantic, Barnum, the Great American Showman, whips US audiences into a frenzy. By the time the singer lands in New York, “Lindomania” is in full effect. As Lind and Barnum travel the country, they play for packed houses every night. The public loves Lind, but as the tour wears on, P. T. Barnum will come to love her more.
Author
Roderick Mayne Thorp, Jr. was an American novelist specializing mainly in crime novels. As a young college graduate, Thorp worked at a detective agency owned by his father. He would later teach literature and lecture on creative writing at schools and universities in New Jersey and California, and also wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. Two of his best known novels were adapted into popular films: his 1966 novel The Detective was made into a 1968 film of the same name, starring Frank Sinatra as Detective Joe Leland, and his 1979 sequel to The Detective, Nothing Lasts Forever, was filmed in 1988 as Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis. Though Die Hard was relatively faithful to Nothing Lasts Forever, it was not made as a sequel to the film version of The Detective. Two other Thorp novels, Rainbow Drive and Devlin, were adapted into TV movies. Thorp died of a heart attack in Oxnard, California.
