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The Villa of Mysteries | 
 enlarge | Author: David Hewson
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 889267
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Pages: 338
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0385337728
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780385337724
ASIN: 0385337728
Publication Date: January 1, 2005
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Condition: Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers! Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Product Description
In a thriller of astounding menace and power, the acclaimed author of A Season for the Dead returns to the landscape he has made his own–the seething landscape of modern-day Rome–where ancient crimes lie hidden beneath colorful, bustling avenues. Here a teenage girl has disappeared, a detective is exploring a 2000-year-old ritual–and an astonishing mystery is about to unravel in a city of secrets and rage….
The Villa of Mysteries
In Rome’s crowded Campo dei Fiori, a woman rushes up to two carabinieri lounging in their sunglasses and uniforms, insisting that her sixteen-year-old daughter has just been abducted. Detective Nic Costa sees the scene unfold and intervenes. Because Costa knows what the two officers don’t: that in the morgue at Rome’s police headquarters, a forensic pathologist is examining the strange, mummified corpse of another
girl, whose disappearance and death bear haunting similarities….
Police pathologist Teresa Lupo is Nic’s colleague, friend, and his only equal when it comes to breaking the rules to get results, whatever the cost. Now, after years of living with the dead, Teresa insists that her superiors move quickly to save a life. Poring over the body of the girl in the morgue, she has found too many similarities between the girls, including a unique, leering tattoo. Lupo is sure that the vanished girl is headed for a bizarre ancient Bacchanalia involving virgins and sacrificial murder–a ritual that is only days away.
As Nic and Teresa claw at the case from two sides–and as Nic finds himself at once puzzled and beguiled by the missing girl’s seductive mother–a chilling picture is beginning to emerge…of secret relationships and sexual depravity, organized crime and unimaginable corruption. With the clock ticking down on a young girl’s life, Nic and Teresa are about to make the most horrifying discovery of all–in a pit of human darkness, where an age-old malevolence still endures, evil has consumed innocence…and a very modern vengeance has begun.
A spellbinding mix of suspense, forensic science, and human drama, The Villa of Mysteries will catch you off guard at every turn–a novel that is at once heartbreaking and impossible to put down.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 This is a work, and an author, of unforgettable stature January 30, 2005
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Until a couple of years ago David Hewson was known primarily as a correspondent for the London Sunday Times. A more rooted, and smarter, friend of mine who reads that publication regularly makes Hewson's dispatch his first visit. Hewson's noteworthy contribution is his ability to make the complex understandable. This quality has been a hallmark of his novels, which combine artistic, religious and cultural elements, and send them swirling through a complex but readily understandable plot peopled by characters who, while foreign to American readers, easily earn their empathy. While Hewson's work is firmly rooted in the tradition of police procedural novels, he refuses to color within the lines; he instead quietly but firmly redrafts the boundary lines of the genre, combining poetic prose, exquisite plotting, and an inexhaustible supply of surprises to create a genre all his own.
THE VILLA OF MYSTERIES is the successor to 2003's A SEASON FOR THE DEAD, the second of what Hewson refers to as "The Rome Novels." Police Detective Nic Costa is back, newly returned to duty after several months' absence to recover from the death of his father as well as other events. Costa does not have much time to get his street legs back. An American couple looking for Roman artifacts in a peat bog discovers the body of a young woman named Eleanor Jamieson who vanished almost two decades previously.
The Italian police force and pathologist Teresa Lupo are still sorting out this discovery when Costa interjects himself into the middle of a situation in Campo dei Fiori, a crowded tourist destination. A woman is frantically seeking police assistance, insisting that her daughter has been abducted. The woman's daughter bears an uncanny, almost frightening, resemblance to Jamieson --- and her abduction has occurred nearly 16 years to the day of the anniversary of Jamieson's disappearance. It appears that both abductions, and Jamieson's murder, are tied to a cult of the god Dionysus. The truth, however, is both stranger and simpler than that.
Costa and Gianni Peroni, his new partner, find themselves in more of a reactive than a proactive position. It is Lupo who steps outside of her job description to obtain justice for one long-dead young woman and to hopefully rescue another. Yet, as the reader and all concerned discover, nothing is really as it seems. Hewson does not even attempt to explain the labyrinthine and uneasy connections between the Italian police and organized crime, and the always blurry line that is both a line of demarcation and commonality between the two. But he illustrates it so sharply through anecdotal description that one comes away with an understanding that is difficult to articulate yet easy to know.
Hewson does not wait until the end of the novel to begin reigning in his numerous plot lines. He chooses instead to introduce and resolve issues from beginning to end, so that at the conclusion of this magnificent work, there is no sense of a rush to resolution, even as --- unbeknownst to the reader --- there is much to be resolved.
But the depth of what Hewson has accomplished goes beyond his considerable plotting and narrative skills. For what Hewson has created in THE VILLA OF MYSTERIES may be arguably one of the most strongly and subtly feminist novels of recent note. The women at the beginning of this book are all victims; by the end, things are not the same. This is a work, and an author, of unforgettable stature.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
 Skip This One April 25, 2005
A Discerning Reader (Cedar Rapids, Iowa)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Hewson's novel is a waste of good talent. He's clearly capable of more fluid writing and characterization than the jumbled, piecemeal story placed before us.
The story revolves around a cult of Dionysius that engages in sexual epicurianism and drug use. Things went awry at one of the parties years ago; and when the victim's body turns up in a Roman suburbian bog, the police are called in to investigate. The characters are predictable and trite, and the plot never seems to connect at all the appropriate points. The ending is a letdown, and I don't think I'll be following any of the future adventures of Nic Costa, et al.
 fine detective tale January 26, 2005
Harriet Klausner
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
Though six months of leave to recover physically from his wounds and mentally from the death of his partner seems a long time to Roman Detective Nic Costa, he has doubts about returning to work which include the skills of his new partner Gianni Peroni. Still he returns so his superior assigns him the case of visiting Americans Bobby and Lianne Dexter who found a corpse of a teenage girl near the Ostia Antica coastal harbor.
The cops quickly realize that the girl was murdered in recent times and not during the Roman Empire era though the preserved garb would speak otherwise. Though police pathologist Teresa Lupo initially blows the murder date by two millennium give or take a century, she, Nic and Gianni soon learn that the victim is the 16-year-old stepdaughter of mobster Virgil Wallis and that another teen is missing. Worse the anti-Mafia task force is interfering as the two cops investigate, but get nowhere losing hope to save the second abducted teen from a sacrificial ritual murderer(s).
Nic is a fine detective whose skills are ordinary, but he never quits even though he faces emotional trauma every time he works the field. Gianni is more amiable but also has plenty of woes to overcome. Teresa and anti-Mafia Agent Rachale D'Amato provide the impetus to keep digging. Though the case resolves abruptly in spite of the lead cops misinterpreting clues, fans will enjoy the return of Nic Costa though his second appearance is not quite as stellar as his superb pulled in two directions efforts in A SEASON FOR THE DEAD.
Harriet Klausner
wonderfully plotted mystery March 30, 2005
reader from newton, ma (newton)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
As a reader of many, many mysteries, I'm not easily taken
in and caught up by plots any more, but this book is the
exception to the rule. I loved the setting (Rome), the
characters, and most of all the surprises that continued to
catch me off guard. This is my first Hewson mystery, and I
am looking forward to reading "Season of the Dead" very
soon.
 Slow and Hard to Read March 4, 2005
EdHopper (Cary, IL United States)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I read the last book with these characters and enjoyed it mostly so I thought I'd give this book a try. What a mistake. The plot was just too out there to follow, the characters are poorly defined (i.e., the all "sound" the same so it's hard to determine who is speaking), and the drug use didn't seem to have any purpose at all. Additionally, the book just didn't seem to flow well when read. Too many thoughts left out perhaps.
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