Villa

Two best friends, Emily and Chess, rent a stunning Italian villa for the summer. It's the same villa where, decades earlier, a rock star was brutally murdered, an event that has since become the stuff of dark, romantic legend. For Emily, the villa is a last-ditch effort to salvage a friendship that has been slowly eroding under the weight of jealousy and professional rivalry. She hopes the shared history and decadent isolation will be a kind of glue, forcing them to reconnect and mend what’s broken. For Chess, the villa is a backdrop. It’s a stage for her next bestseller, a place to perform the role of a successful author while subtly mining their shared past—and Emily’s present turmoil—for material. They are living in the same house, drinking the same wine, and staring at the same sunset, but they are telling themselves two entirely different stories about why they are there and what the summer is for.

This dynamic of shared space and divergent realities—where friendship can curdle into a creative and personal rivalry—is a landscape Rachel Hawkins navigates with precision. A former teacher turned full-time novelist, Hawkins has built a career exploring the dark corners of female relationships, particularly how ambition, love, and history can become entangled. She was drawn to the idea of a beautiful, sun-drenched setting that concealed a sinister past, mirroring the way a close friendship can hide years of unspoken resentment. "Villa" emerged from her fascination with this contrast: the idyllic surface versus the gothic darkness underneath, and how two people can inhabit the exact same story but live in completely different worlds.

Module 1: The Haunted Friendship

The story revolves around two lifelong friends, Emily and Chess. They are two sides of the same coin, bound by a history that's as comforting as it is suffocating. The first core idea is that long-term friendships are layered with love, resentment, and inevitable change. Emily is a cozy mystery writer whose career has stalled. Her life feels like a complete mess. She’s gone through a humiliating divorce and is battling a mysterious illness. Chess, on the other hand, is a self-help guru phenom. Her book, The Powered Path, is a massive success. She’s a brand. She’s everything Emily is not.

Emily admits it herself. Somewhere around the time her friend started calling herself "Chess," she realized she might actually hate her. This is a complex cocktail of admiration, irritation, and the painful awareness of her own perceived failure. Yet, when Chess calls with her signature affectionate greeting, all that resentment melts away. She’s flooded with a familiar warmth. This duality is the heart of their relationship. It's real, it's messy, and it sets the stage for everything that follows.

This leads to a related insight. Public personas and personal branding can create distance in personal relationships. Emily knew Chess as Jessica, then Jaycee, then Jay. Now, the world knows "Chess Chandler," a name that looks great on a book cover. Emily watches Chess perform her public persona—the effortless energy, the curated casualness—and feels tired just watching her. She even hate-reads Chess’s books, looking for sentences to roll her eyes at. The brand has become a barrier. It makes the friend she grew up with feel like a stranger, a performance artist whose success is both impressive and alienating.

So what happens next? Chess, in a grand gesture of friendship, invites the struggling Emily to spend the summer at a luxurious Italian villa. Villa Aestas. It’s an offer of a "hard reset." A chance to escape the wreckage of her life and find inspiration again. For Emily, it’s an irresistible escape. A chance to leave her empty house, post glamorous photos to spite her ex-husband, and maybe, just maybe, start writing again. But as we soon learn, this idyllic setting is anything but simple.

Module 2: The Villa with Two Histories

Now, let's turn to the villa itself, which is a character with a dual identity. Upon arrival, Emily is stunned by its beauty. It’s every dream you could have of an Italian villa. Butter-colored stone, a shimmering pool, fields of sunflowers. It feels like a movie set, a private universe of peace and serenity. But this idyllic beauty masks a dark past. This brings us to a central theme of the book: Beautiful things can contain their own darkness.

Emily knows the villa’s history. In 1974, when it was called Villa Rosato, it was the site of a grisly murder. A young musician named Pierce Sheldon was killed. His death became a rock-and-roll legend, a lurid tale of sex, drugs, and occult rumors. The first thing Emily says when she sees the perfect villa is, "I can’t believe someone got murdered in this house." The contrast is immediate and jarring. Chess quickly dismisses it. She rationalizes that people get murdered in all kinds of houses, so why not gorgeous ones? They decide to compartmentalize the past and enjoy the present.

But Emily can’t let it go. Her writer’s curiosity is piqued. This is where the novel’s structure becomes so effective. The narrative splits into two timelines. In the present, we follow Emily and Chess. In the past, we are transported to that fateful summer of 1974. We meet the players in the original tragedy. There's the charismatic but cruel rock star, Noel Gordon. There’s the talented but selfish musician, Pierce Sheldon. And at the center of it all are two young women: Mari Godwick and her stepsister, Lara Larchmont. This structure sets up a powerful dynamic. The past exerts a tangible, almost haunting influence on the present.

As Emily starts digging into the 1974 murder, she discovers a fascinating link. Mari Godwick, the quiet, observant writer in the 1970s group, went on to write a groundbreaking feminist horror novel called Lilith Rising. Emily finds a vintage copy in the villa’s library and becomes obsessed. She feels a kinship with Mari, another writer struggling to find her voice amidst personal chaos. She starts to believe that Mari’s novel is a key, a coded confession. Emily suspects art can be a vessel for hidden truths. She believes Mari used her novel to tell the world what really happened that summer. This obsession gives Emily a new purpose. She abandons her cozy mystery series and starts writing a new book—a hybrid of true crime, biography, and memoir about the villa, Mari, and the murder. For the first time in a year, she feels alive. She feels like a writer again.