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3.5 stars

Rachel Hawkins has always excelled at memorable characters and snappy dialogue in her YA novels, but it's a nice surprise to find her adult thriller is also well-plotted. (I haven't read her first adult novel yet.) The story unfolds logically in dual timelines--not the easiest thing to carry off--and she creates a hazy, lazy summer European vacation vibe in this story of two women who rent a villa together in hopes of both rekindling their friendship and somewhat stalled writing careers. The villa was the site of an infamous murder decades ago and learning about the crime changes the women in ways they do not expect.

I haven't read any interviews or any articles about this book, but it was clear to me pretty quickly that the alternate timeline, from the POV of the writer Mari, was inspired by Mary Shelley. She and her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were invited to Lord Byron's home, where it's said he challenged all of them to write a ghost story. What came out of it was the landmark scifi horror masterpiece Frankenstein, as well as persistent rumors of a love triangle between the three of them, as well as Mary's own sister. More on the messy scandal in a nutshell here: There are many, many parallels between what happens to the residents of The Villa, too many for this to be an accident. I kind of look on this book as Hawkins dragging that story out of its fog-covered origins to sun-drenched Italy, much the way Hitchcock did one of North by Northwest's most iconic scenes--a meeting with an unknown contact not on a dark, rainy street corner, but in the middle of the day in the blazing sun.

Where the novel falls a little short, I think, is in how predictable much of the plot is, as well as how faithfully the past and present story lines mirror each other (on top of inspiration from real life). They correspond so perfectly that I kept thinking of the movie Dead Again, in which reincarnation plays a role in a couple reliving the same mistakes almost exactly; this kind of thing plays better visually than in literary form, at least one as obvious as it is here.

Still, lots of props to the author for writing vacation polyamory, complicated female relationships, and professional/childhood-to-adulthood rivalry in a way that feels convincing and compelling. I liked how the ending leaves our main narrator and her friend as well, though again, the means by which it was achieved was a little too loud an echo of the past to truly be a surprise. But the time passes quickly, engrossingly, and enjoyably. I like adult Rachel Hawkins and I am excited to read more.

Also: I dearly wish Lilith Rising, the book Mari became famous for, was a real book. I would read the shit out of that.

Audio Notes: Julia Whelan is, as always, perfect.