The Villa by Rachel Hawkins * * * *
The novel is told across two timelines, both centred on the same villa near Orvieto, Italy. In the present day, Emily is a writer whose life has stalled. Her marriage is ending, she has spent much of the previous year suffering from a mysterious illness, and she is struggling to finish the tenth book in her long running cosy mystery series. Emily is not a huge bestselling author, but she has built a real and dependable career. Her books sell consistently and provide her with a decent living, yet her soon to be ex-husband Matt now believes he deserves a share of that income because Emily occasionally discussed her plots with him. He treats listening to her talk through an idea as though it is equivalent to sitting down and writing an entire novel.
Emily’s childhood friend Chess invites her to spend the summer at an Italian villa, and the trip appears to offer exactly what Emily needs. Chess is also a writer, although her career looks completely different. She has turned herself into a highly successful self help brand, with bestselling books, polished advice, speaking engagements, and a carefully controlled public image. She is wealthy, confident, highly visible, and skilled at making her personality part of the product. Emily, by comparison, has spent years quietly producing books while her health, marriage, and confidence have gradually deteriorated. Chess pays for the villa, Emily does not have to worry about money, and the plan is for both women to spend the summer writing.
The villa, however, is not simply a beautiful holiday rental. It was once the site of a notorious murder involving a group of artists who stayed there during the 1970s. The earlier timeline follows Mari and her stepsister Lara, two young women caught within a chaotic circle of musicians, writers, lovers, and would-be creative geniuses. They arrive at the villa with Mari’s partner Pierce, the famous musician Noel Gordon, and Noel’s friend Johnnie. The holiday quickly becomes filled with drugs, alcohol, jealousy, shifting relationships, sexual tension, and creative rivalry, and the group’s time there eventually ends in murder.
This historical storyline is clearly inspired by the famous gathering near Lake Geneva involving Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori. Mari reflects Mary Shelley, Pierce reflects Percy Shelley, Noel reflects Byron, Lara occupies the Claire Clairmont role, and Johnnie resembles Polidori. The parallels are not exact, but they are very deliberate, especially once Mari begins writing a horror novel called Lilith Rising, which naturally echoes Frankenstein. Rachel Hawkins combines Romantic literary history with the mythology of 1970s rock stars, creating a group in which everyone is supposed to be an artist, yet the women are the ones who actually produce the work that lasts.
Mari becomes consumed by Lilith Rising. She is determined to finish the novel even while the people around her constantly interrupt, distract, and underestimate her. Lara is equally driven, and her music gives her an identity that exists beyond her relationships with the men. Both women understand that talent is not enough. They also need time, concentration, and control over their own work. Meanwhile, the men drink, take drugs, argue, pursue sex, and perform the role of tortured artists. They dominate the room, but the women create the legacy. That contrast became one of the most interesting parts of the novel for me.
In the present day, Emily becomes increasingly fascinated by what happened at the villa. She reads Lilith Rising, listens to podcasts about the murder, studies old accounts, and begins searching for details that may have been overlooked. Gradually, the cosy mystery she originally intended to write becomes less important than the possibility of uncovering a new version of the villa’s history. At first, I found this contemporary storyline much stronger than the historical one because Emily’s situation creates immediate tension. Her marriage is collapsing, her health has only recently started improving, and Chess’s generosity feels both comforting and slightly unsettling.
There is also something very believable about Emily as a working writer. She is not a literary phenomenon. She writes a dependable series, produces books consistently, meets deadlines, and earns money from work that other people may dismiss because it is cosy crime. Matt’s attitude towards her books shows how easily creative labour can be minimised. He believes he deserves part of her income because she bounced ideas off him, which turns casual participation in her process into a claim of ownership.
His entitlement also shapes their conflict over children. Matt wanted a baby and believed the matter had already been settled after one limited discussion, while Emily remained uncertain. He moved forward as though her hesitation was temporary and unimportant, announced to their families that they were trying for a child, and then became angry when Emily continued taking birth control. He did not treat Emily’s uncertainty as a valid position. He treated it as resistance to the future he had already chosen. His claim on her book income therefore feels like part of a much larger pattern. Matt believes Emily’s work, body, and future should all be available to him.
Emily’s mysterious illness also becomes increasingly suspicious. She had been unwell for much of the previous year while living with Matt, but her condition begins improving after their separation. The novel does not initially provide a clear explanation, yet the timing makes it difficult not to question whether Matt played some role in her illness.
The 1970s storyline initially feels more chaotic because there are several relationships to follow and nearly everyone is drinking, taking drugs, changing partners, and competing for attention. However, that messiness becomes more effective once the villa begins to feel like a sealed environment in which everyone’s resentments are intensifying. The warm stone, dry Italian landscape, bright rooms, and surrounding countryside create the appearance of freedom, but the people inside are increasingly trapped by one another. Mari remains the strongest part of this timeline because her writing is not presented as a charming hobby. It is urgent, consuming, and deeply important to her. She understands that the story matters before anyone else does.
As the novel progresses, the two timelines begin to reflect each other more clearly. Both Emily and Mari are writers trying to create while navigating relationships that threaten to consume their attention. Both are surrounded by people who want access to their work, their loyalty, their identity, or their success. Both timelines also ask whether friendship between women can remain genuine once ambition, money, jealousy, and creative ownership become involved.
Chess is especially effective because she is so difficult to read. She can be generous, affectionate, and supportive, but she can also be controlling, image conscious, and unnaturally polished. Her entire career depends on presenting certainty. She sells clarity, personal transformation, emotional wisdom, and control, while her own relationship with Emily contains none of those things. Their friendship is full of old tensions, unspoken competition, affection, resentment, and dependence. The novel understands that a friendship lasting since childhood is not automatically healthy. Sometimes it simply means that two people have had more time to collect grievances.
The Villa is not an especially fast thriller. Much of the suspense comes from research, old documents, conversations, memories, and Emily’s changing interpretation of the people around her. It is less interested in constant danger than in the gradual destabilisation of a familiar story. The mystery matters, but the book is equally concerned with authorship. Who owns an idea? How much influence gives someone the right to claim part of a book? Can a story ever reveal the complete truth? Does the most convincing version of an event eventually become more important than what actually happened?
These questions run through both timelines. History is not presented as something fixed and neutral. It is written, edited, published, repeated, marketed, and eventually accepted. The novel becomes much more interesting once it begins examining not only what happened, but who gets to decide what happened.
I gave The Villa four stars. The book is competently written, atmospheric, and more thoughtful than its bright Italian setting initially suggests. The contemporary storyline remained the stronger of the two for me, particularly because Emily’s marriage and friendship with Chess create such an uncomfortable mixture of intimacy and suspicion. The historical storyline takes longer to settle, but it becomes much more compelling once Mari and Lara’s creative work moves to the centre.
I would recommend this to readers who enjoy dual timelines, literary mysteries, stories about writers, complicated female friendships, and thrillers built around old crimes rather than constant action. The villa may be beautiful, but beauty is only the surface. Underneath it lies a struggle over who gets to create the story, who gets to profit from it, and whose version will survive.
SPOILER SECTION
The following section contains full spoilers for the ending of The Villa.
Emily discovers hidden material connected to the 1970s murder and becomes convinced that Mari left behind a diary revealing the truth. According to this version, Mari killed Pierce after discovering that he had slept with Lara again and that Lara’s pregnancy might have been his. Mari’s supposed diary describes a moment of rage in which she kills Pierce, while Lara helps her conceal what happened. Emily and Chess use this account as the foundation for their book about the villa because they believe they have uncovered the hidden truth behind one of the most famous artistic murders of the era.
The final revelation is that the diary is not really a diary. It is Mari’s last novel. Mari wrote it while dying of cancer, creating an alternate version of the murder in which she made herself the killer. The manuscript reads like a confession because she deliberately presents it that way, but it is still fiction. The real killer was Johnnie.
This changes the entire meaning of Emily and Chess’s investigation. They believe they are correcting the historical record, but they are actually replacing one false account with another. Their book will present Mari’s fictional confession as fact, and because it is dramatic, intimate, convincing, and marketable, it will probably become the version that people remember. Mari understands that this may happen. By the time she writes the manuscript, everyone else involved is dead and she is dying too. She no longer cares whether future readers believe she killed Pierce because the people who could be protected, punished, or damaged by the truth are gone.
Her fictional confession therefore becomes a final act of creative control. For most of her life, Mari was surrounded by other people’s versions of what happened. Pierce’s murder became part of public mythology, while the men in the group remained at the centre of the story. By writing herself into the role of the killer, Mari takes ownership of the narrative one last time. It almost feels like a final joke at the expense of historians, journalists, readers, and podcasters who believe every document contains one recoverable truth. Mari gives them a confession because she knows they will want to believe it.
That was the most interesting part of the novel for me. The book does not reveal a final, pure version of the past and allow the reader to feel satisfied. Instead, it shows how easily fiction can become history when the fiction is more compelling than the truth. Emily and Chess repeat the same process. The public will believe their book because it is presented as an investigation built around newly discovered evidence, while the fact that the evidence is itself a novel may never become known. Mari’s invented story moves from private manuscript to published history. The truth does not win. The best story wins.
The modern storyline becomes even darker when Matt arrives at the villa. Chess previously slept with him, and he begins contacting and pursuing her again. She claims that she does not want him, but her behaviour remains difficult to interpret. Matt becomes intrusive and increasingly threatening, and Emily and Chess eventually invite him to the villa under the pretence of talking through the situation. Then they kill him.
This creates a direct parallel between the timelines. In both stories, women trapped in destructive relationships become connected through the death of a man. In both, the surviving women reshape the narrative afterwards. In both, private truth and public truth move further apart. However, I do not think Chess and Emily enter this final arrangement as equals.
My interpretation is that Chess has manipulated the entire situation because she needs Emily professionally. She wants to leave the self-help industry, but she cannot create the kind of fiction career she wants without a stronger writer. Emily and Chess took writing classes together when they were younger, so Chess already understands the difference between their abilities. Chess can create a concept, package it, market it, and sell it. She knows how to build a brand. Emily is the person who can actually write the book.
Emily later admits that she wrote around seventy-five percent of their joint novel, while Chess contributed less and supplied some of the ideas. Chess therefore gains a new literary career largely through Emily’s labour. Under normal circumstances, Emily could eventually walk away. She could decide that the partnership was unfair, stop writing with Chess, and return to her own books. After Matt’s murder, she cannot leave so easily.
Chess and Emily now share a secret that could destroy both of them. Their creative partnership is no longer held together only by friendship, money, publicity, or contracts. It is held together by mutual guilt, and that gives Chess enormous control. Chess may not have planned every detail from the beginning, but I believe she deliberately moved people into positions that benefited her. She slept with Matt, drew Emily into the villa, encouraged the new writing project, and helped create a situation in which Matt could be removed permanently.
By the end of the novel, Chess has exactly what she needs. Matt is gone, Emily is no longer distracted by the divorce, the two women have a successful book, Chess has escaped the limitations of self-help publishing, and Emily is tied to her through murder. The arrangement may look empowering because the women have defeated a controlling man and reclaimed their story, but it may simply replace one controlling relationship with another. Emily escapes Matt, yet she may now be trapped by Chess.
That is why I can imagine the partnership eventually ending in another murder. Emily is already uncomfortable with how much of the writing she does and how much credit Chess receives. If that resentment continues to grow, Chess may eventually become the next person Emily sees as standing between her and her independence. The ending is not really about two women walking freely into a successful future. It is about ownership, dependence, resentment, and narrative control continuing in a different form.
Chess is especially fascinating because her manipulation fits her profession perfectly. She has built a career by telling people how to understand their own lives, and she packages emotion, identity, struggle, and transformation into a clean public narrative. She knows that people rarely buy truth in its messy form. They buy a version of truth that feels organised and meaningful. That is exactly what she does to Emily. She turns Emily’s failing marriage, Matt’s death, Mari’s manuscript, and their friendship into the foundation of a new brand.
Mari does something similar, although her motives are different. Mari rewrites the murder because she is dying and wants one final act of authorship. Chess rewrites the present because she wants to preserve her career. Both women understand that controlling the story can be more powerful than controlling the facts.
The theme of creative ownership also connects the two timelines. Pierce, Noel, and Johnnie spend much of the historical storyline drinking, arguing, taking drugs, pursuing sex, and performing artistic importance, while Mari and Lara produce the lasting work. Mari writes Lilith Rising, and Lara creates the music that makes her famous. The men generate noise. The women create the legacy.
The same pattern appears in the present. Matt claims ownership over Emily’s books because he listened to her ideas, while Chess contributes less to their joint novel but receives equal recognition because she already has the larger platform. Emily writes while other people decide what portion of the result belongs to them. That made the novel feel less like a straightforward murder mystery and more like a story about who profits from women’s creativity.
I gave The Villa four stars. The book is messy, particularly in the 1970s storyline, and the mystery is not driven by constant action. Much of the tension comes through reading, research, hidden documents, uncomfortable conversations, and shifting interpretations. However, the ending gives the novel much more weight because the false diary, Matt’s murder, Chess’s manipulation, and the uneasy co-writing partnership all reinforce the same central idea.
There is no neutral version of a story. Every account is shaped by the person who writes it, the person who publishes it, and the person who benefits from it. Mari turns fiction into confession. Emily and Chess turn confession into history. Chess turns murder into a career opportunity. By the end, the most dangerous person is not necessarily the one who commits the crime. It is the one who controls the version everyone else will believe.
Comments
Post a Comment