The Villa of Mysteries

The Rome Series: Book 2

By: David Hewson

Narrated by: Christopher Kay

In Rome's crowded Campo dei Fiori, a woman rushes up to two carabinieri lounging in their sunglasses and uniforms, insisting that her 16-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.

©2004 David Hewson (P)2004 W F Howes Ltd

If you can get past the cheesy accents

...then this book is a pretty good mystery. Why they chose to do the main characters (all Italian) with REALLY bad Italian accented English is beyond me, maybe because there were one or two English speaking characters?

I do plan to keep up with the series, but will probably read the rest.

con gusto!

Engaging, amusing characters. Plenty of surprises that keep you guessing until the end. A mystery with special pleasures for archaeology buffs and anyone who has ever visited Rome.

What's with the bad Italian accents?!

After starting with, and very much enjoying, the most recent book (The Garden of Evil) in this series, I decided to go back to the begining. The first book was great and so was this one, but the Itallian accents!! Eek. The narrator is actaully pretty good, but the accent he uses for the Italians is not only the same for all characters, but it sounds like Triumph the insult comic dog. Awful!! It was difficult to take the characters seriously. And most annoying was that it was VERY difficult to tell who was speaking when the characters were all Italian. I still recommend the book, but I think a new reader is called for. Be aware of what you are getting when you download this book.

good story horrible narration

This is my third Hewson book. I wondered during the first book why a story set in Venice with Rome police would use a heavily British accent. I got used to the British accent and idioms in the second book. The third book, The Villa of Mysteries, answered all my questions. The narrator used the fakest of all fake Italian accents and the accents used speaking the British idiom almost ruined the book for me. The story fit the Hewson's style, seems well researched and follows familiar characters of the Rome police department. A major feature of the book involving a 7 year old boy strains the reader's ability to swallow a premise but huge jumps of acceptance are the hallmark of this genre. If you can get past the narration, and that is a big if, the story is worth the effort.

Silly Accents

Despite the accent which at first makes the characters sound silly,(you get used to it)the story is engaging and the characters interesting. I found this book very entertaining.

Italian accents

Hewson's books are great, but I far prefer the other narrator, the one who read The Sacred Cut and The Seventh Sacrament. This one, in addition to mispronouncing Italian words (which the other guy also did), reads all the dialogues with an Italian accent. This is absurd! Italians do not speak to each other in English with an Italian accent! Obviously they would speak in Italian and without a foreign accent, and since the book is in English, can't we just assume we are reading a translation into English of what they said, and dismiss the silly accents, please? As they stand, the accents are very distracting and make a caricature of what are otherwise excellent dialogues. Do listen anyway, though, because these are great books, engaging at every level and far better written than Dan Brown's.