This mystery follows childhood friends Emily and Chess. They used to be inseparable, but have grown apart in recent years due to demands in their professional and personal lives. However, after meeting one day for lunch, Chess invites recently divorced and writer's blocked Emily to a trip to Italy to kick start the creative juices. They're staying at Villa Aestas, a high-end vacation rental now, but was the scene of a murder in 1974 involving a notorious rock star, an up-and-coming musician, his girlfriend, and her sister. As Emily digs into the Villa's history, she realizes the horror novel written by one of the 1974 group might be more related to the events of that summer than she originally thought. As Emily's investigation deepens, the tension grows between her and Chess - and when secrets from the past are revealed, the villa might claim another victim.
The dual timeline was used to perfection in this story. I absolutely loved both timelines and the ways they intersected. We are told the general outcome of the past timeline early on - someone ends up dead, there's a murder trial - but we don't know the details until later on in the book so it was fun following that timeline and trying to guess how it would all play out. The present day timeline was more focused on the interpersonal dynamic/tension between Emily and Chess rather than Emily's eventual research into the events in 1974. I thought this difference was a nice touch because then we don't have too much duplication of seeing something happen in 1974 in the past timeline and then having to read about it again when Emily finds out about it.
We have a handful of very colorful characters in this read which made it even more fun. Emily is the most bland of the characters - but not in an underdeveloped way. She's just simply the most regular person in contrast to all of these very colorful and enigmatic other characters. Since she's the most 'normal' person as well as our main character, she easily acts as bit of a reader stand-in. I think we get a good amount of Emily and Chess's backstory but I would have liked a little more from their relationship. Early on in their stay at the villa, we do get a little bit of them reminiscing and I think more of that would have really strengthened their connection on-page for me. I loved all of our 1974 characters and found them to be pretty colorful characters but managing to still feel believable and not cross the line into caricature.
There's a really interesting mix of tones in this book. We get some good creepy gothic house vibes, especially when Emily is at the height of her investigation and she's searching the house. But that is contrasted with the rest of the setting being a luxurious Italian villa during the summer. I really enjoy these stories that have this mix, especially when the darker, gothic parts are the unexpected undertones. This is my third read from Hawkins and I think this is a balance that she does well in a lot of her books and it always works well for me. This balance is also present in both timelines to different extents which, again, made this a really fun read.
The ending reveal I think is going to be pretty divisive, but I absolutely loved it. We get a couple of big reveals in pretty quick succession toward the end and while some were what I was expecting, a few were not. We also get a bit of a timejump at the end that I wish we had gotten a bit more of those events on page. It felt like we fast-forwarded over the climax of the book and I was a little bummed. However, we do get the after-effects of those events which were interesting and left the ending a bit open.
Overall, this was a really fun read and solidified Hawkins as an insta-read author for me. I loved the use of the dual timeline and the setting was fantastic.
Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for the ARC
Expected publication date is January 3, 2023
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