Rachel Hawkins is the author of popular thrillers like The Wife Upstairs and Reckless Girls. Her brand new book, The Villa, came out on January 3, 2023, and features a cast of strong women leads. If you’re thinking about reading The Villa, you can read the first part of this review spoiler-free.

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for The Villa.

Violence.
Intimacy.
Murder.
Pregnancy.
Loss of a child.
Blood.
Drug use.

Quick Synopsis

The Villa by Rachel Hawkins is a book with many layers. The narrator, Emily Sheridan, decides to go on a trip to Italy with Chess Chandler, her old childhood and college friend. Emily is going through health problems, which led to a complicated divorce between her and her soon-to-be ex-husband, Matt.

Emily is the author of a series of mystery novels, and Chess Chandler is the biggest name in self-help. Because of her current circumstances, Emily is struggling to finish her mystery novel. It’s important that she finishes because she needs the money to help pay for the divorce. Chess suggests that Emily accompany her to a villa in Italy for the summer so she can get some work done.

The villa in question has a horrific past, which leads Emily even further from her work and down an investigative rabbit hole. As the summer stretches on, the two women begin to get on each other’s nerves, and their friendship comes under harsh light. As the mystery of the villa unravels and Emily questions Chess’s intentions, you’re left wondering if the house is doomed to repeat past failures.

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

Rating Scale | Deion Reads — My Rating Scale

By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.

I gave The Villa four out of five stars, which means I wouldn’t read it again, but I would recommend it to a friend. If you like thrillers or books set in Italy, I would definitely recommend it. For a softer, more sentimental book set in Italy, consider One Italian Summer by Rebecca Searle.

Book Cover: One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of the review. If you think The Villa sounds like the kind of book you’d read, you should click away, read it, then come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of this book but don’t want to read it, continue on for a full rundown.

There was so much context and detail in The Villa that I had to exclude some minor elements to make this semi-short, but I’ll do my best to cover everything that matters.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

The Villa starts with the narrator, Emily Sheridan, meeting with her old friend, Chess Chandler. They hardly see one another because Chess is a big-time sensation in the self-help world, having published several best-selling books in that genre. Emily is going through a divorce, which was caused in part by a few years of terrible health issues that she’s just beginning to recover from, which apparently led her husband to cheat on her. Though the symptoms were very real, no doctor was ever able to give her an answer for what was wrong, and no medication could solve the problem.

When Chess hears that Emily is struggling to finish her current mystery novel, she invites her along on a trip to Italy. Emily wants to get out of the house she shared with her former husband, so she agrees to come along. Not only is Emily going through a divorce, but her ex-husband is arguing that he deserves royalties from all of her books due to the support he gave her during the marriage.

Emily arrives in Italy and discovers that the villa they’re staying in has a haunting past. In the 1980s, a rockstar and his guests stayed in the house for a summer, only to wake up one morning to find a horrible murder. As The Villa tells Emily’s story, it also tells the story of Mari, one of the women who stayed in the house when the murder took place.

Mari is only nineteen, but is dating a much older man, Pierce, who aspires to be a rockstar. Mari, Pierce, and Mari’s step-sister, Lara travel to Italy to stay in the villa with Noel Gordon, a popular rock musician. They discover that Noel isn’t there alone, and actually has a friend named Johnnie who is also staying at the house. Mari recently lost a baby and is still recovering from the trauma and grief, and is also in something of a competition with her step-sister, Lara, over Pierce’s interest.

Noel and Pierce work on music together and exclude Johnnie, who wants nothing more than to be included in Noel’s next album. Everyone in the house takes turns making fun of Lara, including Noel, who invited her there. Tensions in the house rise as Johnnie becomes increasingly frustrated and Pierce finds out that his wife (whom he’s currently cheating on with Mari) takes her own life, leaving his son behind.

Emily starts to become more and more interested in the story behind the house and finds a hidden diary entry from Mari describing the events in the house leading up to the murder. Chess starts to become interested in the subject of Emily’s work, going so far as to snoop and read through her manuscript. Chess brings up the two of them writing the book together, but Emily dismisses the idea, wanting to keep the subject to herself.

Tensions escalate when we find out that Chess sends an email to her agent detailing an idea for a true crime novel (the one that Emily’s writing) and Emily makes digs at Chess’s self-help language and personality. After having a phone call with her soon-to-be ex-husband and drinking something Chess makes for her, Emily becomes violently sick, just like she was during her marriage.

Emily gets revenge by also snooping on Chess’s computer, and Emily also finds an extra hidden part of the manuscript that details the end of the story with Mari, Noel, Lara, Johnnie, and Pierce. This ending is everything she needs for her book and depicts Mari herself being the one to kill Pierce, despite the fact that Johnnie was convicted.

We come to the height of the conflict when Emily sees Chess wearing an anklet that she’d seen in Matt’s drawer — and assumed was for her. Emily tackles the other woman and the two begin fighting, and it’s revealed that Chess and Matt slept together when Emily was sick. Chess explains that it only happened once because Chess didn’t think Matt was a good husband and wanted to see if he would go through with it.

Chess then explains that the entire trip to Italy was planned by her so she could tell Emily about the affair and about Matt’s continued efforts to be with her. The two talk on the floor following the fight, and Chess is slowly able to win Emily over to see that what Chess did wasn’t actually that bad. Chess reasons that the reason why Emily was so sick all the time was Matt, and that the single phone call with him is what made her sick again in Italy.

Emily agrees to share the villa project with Chess, and shows Chess the final piece from Mari’s diary, which details how Mari killed Pierce and framed Johnnie for the whole thing. Following that, Mari went on to publish a best-selling horror novel titled Lilith Rising, and Lara went on to release an incredibly successful album called Aestas.

The two women work together to quickly get Matt out of the picture so he can’t take royalties from Emily or threaten to expose Chess as having slept with her best friend’s husband. They go on to publish the book about the villa together and are very successful.

At the end of the book, we find out that the extra entry Mari left was fiction, and that she didn’t have anything to do with Pierce’s death. She leaves the notes in the wall and determines that whatever happens with them happens, and it won’t matter after she’s dead anyway.

Deep Dive

Praise

I always like to start with what I like first, and the main thing I have to give this book props for is that it got my heart racing a few times. I even missed my bus stop because I couldn’t pull my eyes away, and that’s a great quality for a book to have. It constantly had me guessing about what the twist was going to be, and I didn’t get it right. If you like an ending you don’t suspect, you may like The Villa.

The characters are rich and complex, and we see that through the relationship between Chess and Emily, and also through the relationships between the five people in the villa during the murder. I feel like The Villa does a good job of making characters real and flawed, and pointing out how impossible it is to ever know what really happened.

There are many layers to this story, starting with the layering of women and narrators. The story goes back to Mari’s mother, a famous author who published a piece about Lilith, Adam’s first wife. Then we see Mari herself being an unreliable narrator through the fake ending she purposefully hides in the house. When reflecting, Mari wonders if her decision to stay in the villa and her hesitancy to come when Pierce called her name decided his fate that night, and her decision to leave the fake ending in the villa is ultimately what decides Matt’s fate.

The first story mirrors the second because in both a man dies, which propels women to fame and success. In the first, Pierce dies, which frees Mari and Lara to publish their work, and in the second story, Matt’s death frees Emily from the burden of sharing her royalties.

At the beginning of The Villa, we question Chess’s intentions and at some points even wonder if she and Matt are conspiring to poison Emily. By the end of The Villa, we understand that both Emily and Chess are twisted and that Emily had a bigger part in her divorce than she let on. In the end, I was mostly apathetic about Matt’s death and Chess and Emily’s new ironclad friendship formed through their murder secret.

Criticism

My first criticism, which isn’t really a criticism and more of an observation, has to do with the nature of the characters. I personally don’t love when the main characters within a story are writers, just because I find it happens often and always lends itself to the story within the story vibe.

Another criticism I can offer for this book is that I felt the pacing at the beginning was slightly off compared to the rest, but I do feel like the quick acceleration near the middle makes up for the slow start. The ending also felt rushed.

At the end, we see the two women welcoming Matt into the villa, then we’re given a brief explanation through a news story that Matt drown in the pool while both women were gone. It’s clear that they conspired to murder him, but the jump from reading about murder and going through with it feels a little too abrupt. So far, these characters have slept with the other’s husband and lied about taking birth control, which still feels very far from murder.

I would have liked to see more about what happens at the end, and maybe would have liked a little more context about Chess and Matt. Perhaps even hinting to some horrible secret event the two women already share with other to indicate that they may be capable of doing something awful together.

But, all in all, I thought The Villa was a perfectly good thriller, and definitely worth reading if you’re into this genre. Check me out on YouTube or Goodreads for more book content.

These are some books I may read next:

All the Dangerous Things — Stacy Willingham
The Mitford Affair — Marie Benedict
How to Sell a Haunted House — Grady Hendricks
Exiles — Jane Harper
Secretly Yours — Tessa Bailey
Victory City — Salmon Rushdie
Always the Almost — Edward Underhill
The Angel Maker — Alex North

Book Review | The Villa by Rachel Hawkins