The Night Villa
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
The eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 buried a city and its people, their treasures and secrets. Centuries later, echoes of this disaster resonate with profound consequences in the life of classics professor Sophie Chase.
Beneath layers of volcanic ash lies the Villa della Notte - the Night Villa - once home to the captivating slave girl at the heart of an ancient controversy. And concealed in a subterranean labyrinth rests a cache of antique documents believed lost to the ages: a prize too alluring for Sophie to resist. But whatever shocking events transpired in the face of Vesuvius's fury has led to deeper intrigues - and Sophie is swiftly sucked into their dark and terrifying vortex . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this complex and lyrical literary thriller from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover), University of Texas classics professor Sophie Chase, after barely surviving a gunman with ties to a sinister cult, joins an expedition to Capri. A donor has funded both the exact reconstruction of a Roman villa destroyed when Mount Vesuvius buried nearby Herculaneum in A.D. 79, and a computer system that can decipher the charred scrolls being excavated from the villa's ruins. Sophie's hopes for a recuperative idyll fade after her old boyfriend, who disappeared years before into the same cult as the campus gunman, appears in the area, implicating the cult in a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, extracts from the scrolls the journals of a Roman visiting the villa just before the volcano erupted shade toward bloodshed and betrayal. The scrolls' oddly modern tone aside, Goodman deftly mixes cultural and religious history, geography, myth, personal memory, dream and even portent without sacrificing narrative drive, against the beautiful backdrop of the locale with its echoes of unimaginable loss. 5-city author tour.
