In the midst of a messy divorce and plagued by author’s block, Emily accepts an invite from her longtime finest buddy, Chess (now a way of life guru), to spend the summer time at an opulent Italian villa. It seems, nevertheless, that the villa has a sordid historical past: Nearly 50 years earlier, within the mid-Seventies, it was the location of a scandalous superstar homicide that in flip impressed a bestselling feminist horror novel. Emily’s rising obsession with the villa’s historical past conjures up her to write down in the end—however investigating that long-ago crime and its aftermath opens up previous fissures in her relationship with Chess. Will the villa’s darkish historical past repeat itself?
Rachel Hawkins’ gothic novel The Villa (8 hours) has a splendidly difficult narrative: Inspired by every thing from Fleetwood Mac and Mary Shelley to the Manson murders, it consists of not solely two separate narratives with two units of characters but additionally a novel-within-a-novel, podcast episodes, weblog posts and extra. Aided in some moments by music, the gifted narrators—Shiromi Arserio, Julia Whelan and Kimberly M. Wetherell—show greater than as much as the duty of guiding listeners via the emotional ambiance that Hawkins has so fantastically created.
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