The Night Villa

July 7, 2008
In this complex and lyrical literary thriller from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover
), University of Texas classics professor Sophie Chase, after barely surviving a gunman with ties to a sinister cult, joins an expedition to Capri. A donor has funded both the exact reconstruction of a Roman villa destroyed when Mount Vesuvius buried nearby Herculaneum in A.D. 79, and a computer system that can decipher the charred scrolls being excavated from the villa's ruins. Sophie's hopes for a recuperative idyll fade after her old boyfriend, who disappeared years before into the same cult as the campus gunman, appears in the area, implicating the cult in a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, extracts from the scrolls—the journals of a Roman visiting the villa just before the volcano erupted—shade toward bloodshed and betrayal. The scrolls' oddly modern tone aside, Goodman deftly mixes cultural and religious history, geography, myth, personal memory, dream and even portent without sacrificing narrative drive, against the beautiful backdrop of the locale with its echoes of unimaginable loss. 5-city author tour.

Starred review from August 15, 2008
Goodman ("The Sonnet Lover") returns with her darkest, most complex novel to date. Classics professor Sophie Chase is trying to deal with the breakdown of both her marriage and her husband, who joined a cultlike group and disappeared. Her attempts to battle her inner demons while trying to be supportive of an intellectually promising but emotionally needy student fail when the student's estranged boyfriend arrives on campus with a gun. In the aftermath of the shooting spree, Chase takes advantage of a research opportunity in Italy, even though the lead professor is an old flame. Goodman always seamlessly blends present-day suspense with a mystery from the past, which here involves ancient papyrus scrolls, buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E., that someone does not want restored. Goodman mixes literary prose with a page-turning plot, making her work appealing to a broad range of readers. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.Beth Lindsay, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2008
Goodman has made a name for herself writingelegant literary thrillers. Her newest follows the template of The Sonnet Lover (2007), asSophie Chase, a classics professor at the University of Texas, researches thefate ofPetronia Iusta, a slave girl living in Capri in AD79, the year Vesuvius erupted. After the boyfriend of one her students goes on a shooting rampage, leaving two dead and Sophie wounded, the handsome but rakish professor Elgin Lawrence convinces Sophie to travel to Capri totranslate the scrolls of a Roman writer named Phineas Aulus. After all, evidencesuggests that Petroniawas at the Villa della Notte at the same time as Phineas. Upon arriving, she is soondrawn into a dangerous conspiracy when she encounters an ex-lover and learns that the Tetraktyans, a cult thatworships Pythagoras, are equally interested in the scrollsand will stop at nothing to get them. Graceful, fluid prose; an intricately plotteddual mystery setin the past and present;a strong heroine; and handsome and mysterious menall combine to make for a thoroughly scintillating read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)