The Villa

Author: Nora Roberts
Published: March 26, 2002 (Jove)
Category: Romance
Rating: 6/10

This is definitely my least favorite Nora Roberts book. There's a lot going on, with a lot of characters with very Italian names, and the potential for the true identity of the murderer is high with the horribly bitchy and evil women sprinkled throughout the cast.

The Villa is about the Giambelli family, one of the biggest and most successful wine companies in the world, and focuses on three women, from three generations of Giambellis. There's Tereza, the family matriarch, her daughter Pilar, and Pilar's daughter, Sophia, head of PR and marketing for the family business. Tereza has been married to her second husband, Eli MacMillan of MacMillan Wines, for twenty years and has always been surprised that a hard woman like her has found love in her marriage of business convenience. Pilar was married to a sorry excuse for a man, Tony, who couldn't keep it in his pants and they were separated for several years until his current trophy girlfriend wanted to be a trophy wife and demanded a divorce so they could marry. Sadly, Pilar never stood up for herself in the marriage, so you can't lay all the blame on Tony's feet. The daughter that resulted from their marriage, Sophia, is like lightning, always on the move and thinking about her next project. She's got her grandmother's backbone, is fiercely independent, and thinks of sex like a man.

Tereza and Eli decide to finally merge their two wineries and create the Giambelli-MacMillan wine company, and restructure the company. Basically, the company will be headed by Sophia and Tyler MacMillan (Eli's grandson) at the end of a one-year trial period if they satisfy the new COO during that time. Think of The Villa as a spin off of Montana Sky. Of course the people who find they aren't getting what they thought was always coming to them are pissed, creating lots of potential enemies, feuding, bitterness, and general cattiness and bitchiness from certain females.

Pilar finds love in the new COO, David Cutter, and Tyler and Sophia fall for each other. Neither relationship happens easily, as Pilar is reluctant to enter into another relationship so soon after Tony. David has two teenage kids and the hurt of a wife who walked out on the family. Ty doesn't want to love Sophia, but he gives in eventually, and Sophia is total piece of work. She's confident to the point of arrogance, so she thought she could just get away with sleeping with Ty a few times and doesn't want to open herself to a relationship and get disappointed because she's got some sort of daddy complex going on, having always loved her father even though he never loved her, and resenting him for not loving her. Everybody's got baggage!

There wasn't much romance in Ty and Sophia's relationship, mostly because Sophia is such a hard person and she didn't like leaning on Ty for support. Even when she did, it didn't seem truly heartfelt. However, the relationship of Pilar and David was the softest and most romantic in the whole bunch. Once Pilar got past feeling bad about starting a new relationship, it was lovely watching a new family form as she and his children felt each other out and realized it was for real; no one's walking out on anybody again.

So with the overabundance of emotional baggage, and threats, personal attacks, internal corporate sabotage, and murder, there's a lot going on at once. And I think it was too much going on, where I just wanted to get through the book so it'd finish. Roberts really outdid herself when she created the trophy wife and disgruntled employee characters because they were absolute queen bitches who didn't think anything of public insults and clearly never had any manners or decency. It annoyed me how they got away with what they did for so long. But you know that the one you want to be the bad guy is never really the bad guy. These two bitches were too obvious to the be real killer. As for the real killer, it was kind of an anticlimax, and the book wound down within three pages, leaving me something like, "Huh? That was it after 486 pages?"