9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a work, and an author, of unforgettable stature, January 29, 2005
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
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
wonderfully plotted mystery, March 30, 2005
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Creepy Roman Rituals, July 9, 2006
The story is great - police and mother try to track down a missing daughter. The story behind her being missing is really creepy - an ancient Roman ritual that leaves nothing to the imagination. There are some very good twists in the novel, and some parts that I am still having trouble understanding (drug use toward the end). Overall, it was a good read.
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