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The Night Villa

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

An evocative tale of intrigue, romance, and treachery, Carol Goodman's spellbinding new novel, The Night Villa, follows the fascinating lives of two remarkable women centuries apart.
The eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 buried a city and its people, their treasures, and their secrets. Centuries later, echoes of this disaster resonate with profound consequences in the life of classics professor Sophie Chase.
In the aftermath of a tragic shooting on the University of Texas campus, Sophie seeks sanctuary on the isle of Capri, immersing herself in her latest scholarly project alongside her colleagues, her star pupil, and their benefactor, the compelling yet enigmatic business mogul John Lyros.
Beneath layers of volcanic ash lies the Villa della Notte—the Night Villa—home to first-century nobles, as well as to the captivating slave girl at the heart of an ancient controversy. And secreted in a subterranean labyrinth rests a cache of antique documents believed lost to the ages: a prize too tantalizing for Sophie to resist. But suspicion, fear, and danger roam the long-untrodden tunnels and chambers beneath the once sumptuous estate—especially after Sophie sees the face of her former lover in the darkness, leaving her to wonder if she is chasing shadows or succumbing to the siren song of the Night Villa. Whatever shocking events transpired in the face of Vesuvius's fury have led to deeper, darker machinations that inexorably draw Sophie into their vortex, rich in stunning revelations and laden with unseen menace.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Sophie Chase, the feisty and intelligent professor at the heart of this historical mystery, is aptly portrayed in Susanna Burney's lively narration. Chase is rendered as both admirable and likable despite her sometimes acidic inner monologue. Two unlikely settings are juxtaposed--a college campus in Texas and an island in the Mediterranean--and demand a narrator with a broad repertoire. The story moves not only between continents, but also between two parallel casts of characters, the first in modern times, the second in ancient Italy at the time of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Burney manages to keep up, fleshing out characters with accents, inflections, and pacing to help the listener maintain coherence throughout the complicated plot and lengthy chapters. M.R. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 7, 2008
      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.

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