THE NIGHT VILLA

TITLE: THE NIGHT VILLA
AUTHOR: CAROL GOODMAN
Pages: 390
Date: 03/03/2009
Grade: 5
Library

This book combined two loves of mine: a good, well plotted thriller and Greek mythology.
Carol Goodman always succeeds in sucking me into a story and capturing my interest to such an extend that I have to restrain myself. By the time I was half way through the book, I had to stop myself from racing along, reading so fast that I would have missed words, sentences or even whole paragraphs. And while she maintains and increases the tension in the story, Goodman never stops using beautiful language for her description or giving the readers all the detail they need to fully appreciate exactly what's going on.
This story starts with a devastating act of violence in a Texas university. To get away from brooding over it too much, classicist Sophie Chase decides to join an archaeological search for ancient scrolls in Italy, near Pompeii.
Sophie hopes to find information on a subject close to her heart, but others are looking for a different scroll, and are prepared to do anything in order to secure it.
Facing an obsessive religious cult, her own past and recent events, Sophie has no idea who to trust, and soon finds that her chances of survival may well be as slim as were the chances of those who lived in the area when Vesuvius erupted.
The only problem with this (edition of the) book is that who ever wrote the blurb on the back cover got the name of the main character wrong.