I must confess before I get started on this review that by the end of the summer break, my box of books was looking a little worse for wear. Basically, I was down to a sporting biography, a pop-out book on Cinderella, a collection of “mementoes” from Coronation Street (which I wrapped up and re-gifted to Coro fan Maggie Barry) and this. Still, The Night Villa read well on the back jacket.
Cory Chase recovers from a shocking act of violence at the Texas University where she works and joins a team of classicists restoring a bunch of charred scrolls in Italy. “Suddenly Cory finds herself following a trail that leads her through Southern Italy, Sicily and to Pythagoras’ birthplace.” Well, I’ve always liked the name Cory, I’ve recently discovered Sicily and am a fan of Greece, so into The Night Villa I launched.
I was a bit surprised to find out the main character is actually called Sophie and while she does indeed make it to Southern Italy, unless I fell asleep for a long while in the middle, she isn’t led through Sicily or Pythagoras’ birthplace. Someone needs to have a stern talking to the Back Jacket Department, methinks.
Anyway, there is an ancient cult, an unstable ex-boyfriend who has been sucked into it and a handsome womanising professor for Sophie to contend with, and the story that the charred scrolls is unravelling is captivating enough – a young slave girl fights a cult mistress for her freedom in the night villa of the title on the eve of the 79AD ot Vesuvius eruption. The rest of the modern-day plot is open for more than a little eye-rolling but it’s better than having no plot at all.
Carol Goodman can definitely hold her head up in the company of The Da Vinci Code and the like but I found that her long-dead slave girl came to life far more than Sophie, who seemed more than a bit dull: the sort of person you really would not want sitting next to you on the trail to Sicily and Greece, so perhaps it’s just as well we didn’t go there.
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