The Villa Golitsyn

An act of treason reverberates from Indonesia to the British Embassy in this thriller of political espionage from the #1 New York Times –bestselling author of Alive.

After an appalling act of sedition results in the mass slaughter of Indonesian guerillas in the jungles of Borneo, suspicion of treason falls on charismatic Cambridge graduate Willy Ludley. A brilliant junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Jakarta, Ludley has disappeared to the South of France. Simon Milson, an old friend, is enlisted to find him and extract a confession. Not a formal investigation, he reasons. Perhaps more like a game.

But when Milson arrives at Ludley’s villa in Nice, he’s startled to find more players than he anticipated, each with an unknowable agenda: Ludley’s tormented but devoted wife; a closeted gay friend from Cambridge and his grossly flirtatious new American fiancée; and a teenage runaway who has mysteriously attached herself to all of them. Over the next couple of days, as loyalties shift, sexual temptations become a weapon, and betrayals are exposed, the truth behind a treasonous act will be just one more revelation at the Villa Golitsyn.

“As if a story dreamed up by Eugene O’Neill had been dramatized by John le Carré,” The Villa Golitsyn is part espionage novel, part thriller, and part tale of political and sexual intrigue ( The New York Times ). It delivers, above all, “a tightly woven story of jealousy that holds the attention to the very end” ( The Sunday Times ).