Havoc
By Christopher Bollen
HAVOC (Harper, 242 pp., $30), a deliciously nasty tale of resentment and revenge, is set in a once-fashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt, where 81-year-old Maggie Burkhardt has grandly taken up residence during the pandemic. Her insatiable need to meddle in the lives of others, often without their knowledge, has already forced her to make exits from 18 previous hotels over five years.
Listening her describe her strange habits and her wacky opinions of other people is great, wicked fun. “I sow chaos. I clean house. I change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not,” she says, ominously. “Only once did my actions end for the worst. But I don’t like to talk about the murder.”
The arrival of another guest — a horrid boy of 8 with his own warped perspective and relish of mayhem — threatens to destroy Maggie’s carefully-constructed spider web of intrigue. Bollen writes with wit and style about an increasingly unhinged battle of wills between two unlikely, and formidable, opponents.
It’s clear that Maggie might not be the most reliable of narrators, especially when she fails to take her medication, but she’s a waspish, stylish observer of people as well as décor. To overlook the deficiencies of the hotel, which she describes as “shredding, pilling, mildewing, and moldering before our very eyes,” she prescribes “a happy glaucomal squint.”
Nobody’s Hero
By M.W. Craven
Ben Koenig, a former U.S. marshal whose analytical mind, elite military training and physical inability to experience fear make him both deadly and reckless, arrives for a gleeful second appearance in NOBODY’S HERO (Flatiron, 401 pp., $29.99). This high-body-count romp is told with such verve and relish that even readers who shy from mayhem might find themselves on Koenig’s side as he hurtles from one impossible near-death experience to the next.
The complex (and preposterous) plot involves something called the Acacia Avenue Protocol, a hypothetical plan that, if initiated, would unleash a cataclysm of unprecedented proportions. The people who attended the top-secret meeting that formulated the plan — including academics like Stephen Williamson, a seemingly innocuous Princeton professor specializing in the history of the Ottoman Empire — are being hunted down and killed, one by one. Can Koenig figure out what is going on and save the day?
In addition to suffering from something called Urbach-Wiethe disease, in which the “amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates the human fight-or-flight response, is compromised,” Koenig has a compulsion to display his esoteric erudition to others, even in the most extreme of situations. “Time is an artificial construct,” he declaims to some police officers about to charge him with murder. “Did you know there’s a clock that’s so accurate it only loses one second every 15 billion years?”
In this book, everything’s a lethal weapon: a specially sharpened credit card, an innocent-looking hairpin and — in a particularly gruesome scene — a shard of bone protruding from Koenig’s recently-mangled leg as he battles a deadly foe. “Slowly, inevitably, like a knife going into fridge-cold butter, the bone punctured the skin and entered Jacob Tas’s groin,” Craven writes. “Game over.”
Deadly Animals
By Marie Tierney
Gore of another kind pervades DEADLY ANIMALS (Holt, 354 pp., $29.99), set near Birmingham, England, in 1981. Ava Bonney, who at 14 has a fascination with what death does to animals’ bodies — she examines roadkill the skill of a medical examiner, then buries the animals — is startled to discover something beneath the carcass of a decaying fox she’s been studying. It’s the body of Mickey Grant, a classmate who has been missing for two weeks.
Ava begins to investigate, even as the police, led by a particularly sensitive detective, open their own inquiry into what soon appears to be the work of a serial killer. Suspects abound, including an elderly man in a nursing home who might not be as senile as he appears, and the sketchy boyfriend of Ava’s unsympathetic mother, Colleen. Complicating matters is the violent nature of the deaths: Among other things, the victims are covered in human bite marks.
It’s a strange and unsettling book, but the writing is beautiful and atmospheric. Ava is a strikingly original heroine, wise beyond her years and respectful of and tender toward the animals she studies. At times she feels animallike herself, so attuned is she to the sights and smells of the natural world. “No moon, no mist: the ground dry as burned bone,” Tierney writes, describing Ava’s impressions of the countryside at night. “Somewhere far away, a dog barked its warning to an unseen intruder. Ava’s nose twitched — petrol, earth, stone.”
This is as much coming-of-age novel as it is macabre mystery, as Ava negotiates her problems at home as well as the more urgent trouble around her. “Ava knew already that, if she was to survive childhood, she not only had to understand but she also had to make excuses, lie, keep secrets; keep her misery silent,” Tierney writes. Is there anyone she can trust?
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