Category Archives: Crime

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

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I’ve missed a few posts lately because I’ve been creating an index for my family history. How detailed? What’s most helpful? These are questions I don’t have the answers to. Having studied family histories other people have assembled, I know an index is invaluable, and the best I can do may be to strike a middle ground between obsession and gloss. Future users will have to rate my success, though I probably won’t hear about it.

But I do want to tell you about a book I really enjoyed, Lori Roy’s The Final Episode. It’s one of a string of books that enter meta-territory, in a way, in that they’re about television, its coverage of true-crime and the impact of that on people involved in the original tragedy. Others in this string that I’ve reviewed are The Murder Show by Matt Goldman, Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker, and one of the best, The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave. Each interesting in its own way and each highlighting significant downsides to the genre.

I can’t always pinpoint why one story totally captures my attention and another doesn’t. It’s some ineffable yet powerful characteristic that goes beyond plot, character, and setting. For whatever reason (reasons?), The Final Episode, kept me spellbound.

Roy provides a great set-up—a true crime television series is reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance of Francie Farrow, taken from her Florida bedroom some twenty years earlier. It happened during a sleepover with twelve-year-old Nora Banks. Feigning sleep, Nora saw and heard the man who took Francie and threaten to take her to the nearby Florida swamp.

Three families’ futures and fates are entangled in this devastating crime. For Francie’s parents, the slow-moving investigation and not knowing what happened to their daughter, where she is, whether she’s alive is, in the long run, more corrosive than the worst possible news.

The neighborhood becomes a pressure-cooker, and Nora and her parents escape to her mother’s childhood home on the fringe of the Big Cypress Swamp, with its venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, bears, bobcats, and cougars.

There, Nora’s family find the protagonist of the story, almost-eleven-year-old Jennifer Jones. Jenny and her two best friends are simultaneously lured by the swamp and obsessed by its terrors. Every girl in South Florida knows about Francie Farrow—the posters and news coverage are unavoidable—and learning that Nora has an intimate knowledge of the event makes her friendship all the more alluring and destabilizing. The disastrous season trudges on—hot, humid, reeking of swamp smells, and plagued by insects. Worse is the maelstrom of accusations, revelations, and manipulations that the families endure. At the end of the summer, another kidnapping occurs, and everything is changed for them all.

The story of the girls’ explorations and their evolving relationships is backdrop to the story of the grown-up Jenny, trying to make a living, out of touch with her childhood friends. But now that the television series is airing, the heartbreaks of that summer are uppermost in the minds of everyone, including Francie Farrow’s poor mother Beverley, increasingly unhinged. With the television series lurching toward a conclusion, no one knows how it will end. Will it reveal what really happened to Francie, and who will be blamed for it?

Author Roy keeps the girls well plugged into the plot. As they go about conditioning their hair and painting their nails, their actions are not only realistic, but to a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious. The male characters are well developed too, including the police officers and FBI agents, the fathers of Francie, Jenny, and Nora, and the adult Jenny’s sometime-boyfriend, Arlen (who has his secrets too). I particularly enjoyed Jenny’s aging grandmother, Dehlia, who never loses faith in her family, her history, and her portents. A real page-turner!

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The Lizard by Dominic Stansberry

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Domenic Stansberry’s new noir mystery takes it slow, unraveling in beautiful prose the confounding situation its protagonist, political ghostwriter SE Reynolds. Stansberry—who hasn’t published a novel in almost a decade—has won numerous prizes, including an Edgar Award (Mystery Writers of America) and a Hammett Prize for his past books.

The Lizard isn’t a typical thriller that keeps the action pulsing and the pages flying. Instead, Reynolds is caught in a net that ever-so-slowly tightens around him. When the book begins, he’s already on the run in a desolate sector of Southern California. It’s La Bahia, a town worn out and on its last legs. Just like the old Hotel La Bahia, destined for the wrecking ball. Just like Reynolds himself? Why anyone would go to this godforsaken place, willingly, is another mystery, yet someone may have followed him there. Or is his paranoia acting up?

Reynolds’s trouble started when a New York literary agent called to persuade him to help out an old friend—Max Seeghurs, another former investigative reporter—who’s supposed to be writing a book about a defunct New Mexico retreat called Sundial. Sundial was a popular destination for people on the make financially, politically, or in Hollywood. Sex and drugs. Alas, Sundial’s owner and his twenty-something son both died under dubious circumstances, the retreat closed down, and Seeghurs wants to pull the band-aid off. Expose the rot. But Seeghurs is having trouble pulling the book together; maybe Reynolds can be his manuscript doctor.

Reynolds isn’t keen on this potential assignment because Seeghurs is notoriously difficult to work with. And, because the last time they met up a couple of years back in Miscoulga, Nebraska, Reynolds had an affair with Seeghurs’s wife, now his ex-wife. But Reynolds’s latest candidate is not committing to hiring him, the money is attractive, and he finally agrees.

It takes some effort to track Seeghurs down out somewhere near the ocean on Coney Island. It’s not an easy thing finding him, the landlord hasn’t been paid and isn’t happy about it. But Reynolds persists and finds Seeghurs, all right. Dead. Trying to find out what happened takes him back to Miscoulga and eventually to the crumbling Hotel La Bahia—a sad place to make a last stand.

For a person who ends up so alone, he has some good relationships. Some of the spirited conversations with his ailing parents are among the funniest in the book. Not the typical mile-a-minute thriller, but one where you’ll want to savor the prose. And, you may find yourself pondering the possibilities, even after you turn the last page.

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Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

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No doubt many crime fiction readers eagerly anticipated Presumed Guilty, Scott Turow’s new legal thriller. I know I did, having been a fan ever since his debut with Presumed Innocent almost 40 years ago. I looked forward to seeing what his character, Rusty Sabich, is up to, now that he’s in his 70s. And, I relish the clash of wits in a good courtroom drama.

In the current book, Rusty’s tenure as a judge in fictional Kindle County, Minnesota, is finished, and he’s moved about a hundred miles north to rural/small town Skageon County. He’s living on a lake and has found a new live-in love, Bea Housley, a school principal.

Bea is not baggage-free. (Which of us is?) She has an irascible father and an adopted son, Aaron, in his early twenties who spent jail time for drug possession with intent to distribute (the drugs actually belonged to his on-and-off girlfriend, Mae Potter). Out on parole now, Aaron has to abide by certain rules: no driving, no associating with drug addicts, and no leaving the county. He’s in Bea and Rusty’s custody and living with them. Thankfully, he’s pulling his life together.

Mae, the beautiful young woman Aaron’s loved for years, remains a problem. He should not be associating with her, not only because it’s a violation of his parole, but because she’s unstable and manipulative. She’s like a tornado through the lives of her friends and family. But young love is what it is. She and Aaron are secretly considering marriage, and he proposes a weekend camping trip to sort out their future once and for all. No phones, no distractions.

The trip ends with a big argument between them, during which Aaron realizes Mae will never change, that she will always be totally self-absorbed, that people’s advice that she’s not good for him is correct, that he’s done. He hitchhikes home, just as Rusty and Bea were about to report his disappearance to his parole officer.

He makes it home. Mae does not. Two weeks later her decomposed body is found, apparently strangled. Aaron is devastated. Her family is too, and immediately points to Aaron as the probable culprit. That fact that he’s Black and Mae was white hovers over him. Is this why they never approved of Mae and Aaron’s relationship? Mae’s father is the Prosecuting Attorney for Skageon County and puts a lot of law enforcement pressure on Aaron. Eventually, Aaron comes to trial.

Much of the book is the unfolding courtroom drama. I liked that part a lot. It was fascinating to see how the defense team tries to unravel the prosecutor’s evidence, making what at first sounds devastating at least open to interpretation. If you enjoy courtroom scenes, you’ll find some riveting ones here.

But at 530 pages, the book has lots of other stuff packed in as well. There’s too much backstory about Rusty, Bea, and their families and, for my taste, way too much navel-gazing by Rusty around various issues. I recognized that he loves Bea and didn’t need it rehashed multiple times. He agonizes at great length about whether he should become Aaron’s defense attorney, as Bea pleads with him to. He shouldn’t, for obvious reasons, and you read all of them, many times. But of course he’s going to do it, or else what’s in those 530 pages? To complicate Rusty’s emotional state further, he and Bea have a serious falling out over an issue I found frankly implausible.

To sum up, while the trial scenes were great, much of the rest of the story was, for me, seriously over-written. It’s like eating three Christmas dinners in one evening. You’re so stuffed it’s hard to say you actually enjoyed the experience.

Jewels of Scandal and Desire

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For a long time, I’ve had the glimmer of an idea for a story about a jeweler for British royalty. You’ll remember how Elizabeth II always wore a lovely pin on her jacket when she was out in public. Somebody must have made them, cleaned them, repaired them. And somebody must have thought about ways to steal them. Somebody besides me, that is.

You can imagine how my interest was piqued by an American Ancestors program “Jewels of Scandal & Desire: British Jewelry Collections and Country Houses,” hosted by Curt DiCamillo, an authority on British historic houses and the decorative arts. He has actually seen some of that jewelry up close, in museum exhibits and when he was presented to the late Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, and The Prince of Wales.

No doubt this is a topic that could have a month’s worth of lectures, and in an hour he had to just hit the highlights and, in some cases, the lowlights of gems among the British royalty. Here are a few anecdotes.

DiCamillo began with Daisy Fellowes, heiress to the Singer sewing fortune. She had an unhappy life, but she did have fabulous jewelry, including the tutti-frutti necklace pictured above with 4500 emeralds, as well as rubies and sapphires, designed by Cartier and now in the Cartier Collection. Cartier also made the spectacular tiara owned by Lady Hugh Montagu Allan (above), who was aboard the Lusitania in 1915 when it was struck by a German torpedo and sunk. One of her maids saved the tiara and Lady Allan was badly injured, but her two daughters were among the 1,150 people lost.

The Earl and Countess of March were tied up for perhaps twelve hours in early 2016 when thieves invaded Goodwood House in West Sussex. They stole jewelry that was not only valuable in monetary terms, but the haul included an emerald and diamond ring King Charles II had given to one of his French mistresses, an ancestor of the Earl. A stolen tiara, containing hundreds of diamonds, was probably disassembled, Di Camillo said. Such pieces are almost never recovered, because loose diamonds are much harder to identify and easier to sell.

While diamonds are often the most prized of the four main gemstones, they’re actually the least valuable. Most valuable are emeralds, followed by rubies, sapphires, and then diamonds. DiCamillo says De Beers has millions of diamonds in warehouses that they don’t release; by limiting availability, they keep the prices high. In the 1700s, diamonds had been found only in India. In the 1800s, they were discovered in Brazil and, later, in South Africa and Russia, so are not as rare as one might think.

A hundred years ago, Margaret Whigham Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, was considered the best-dressed woman in the world. She lived quite a scandalous life and had numerous lovers. She even made it into a Cole Porter song. But in 1943 she fell 40 feet down an elevator shaft. Although she recovered, she permanently lost her sense of smell. She and the Duke of Argyll lived in beautiful Inverara Castle (where some Downton Abbey scenes were filmed). Alas, in 1954, her jewelry was stolen by cat burglars and never recovered. Eventually the Duke divorced her for infidelity (he was no peach, either). Once at the top of society, she died in a nursing home in 1992.

Lots of good stories could be spun from these little episodes, but they all seem to carry the same message: “wealth does not guarantee happiness.”

“Heat of the Moment”

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Erica Rivas, Wild Tales
Érica Rivas in Wild Tales

Malcolm Gladwell—always thought-provoking—recently reviewed the new book Unforgiving Places in The New Yorker (9 June), which examines strategies to prevent violent crime. The book’s author, Jens Ludwig, directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Ludwig’s approach divides the phenomenon of gun violence into two main types, each of which has different motivations and modes of prevention. He believes the reason many preventive strategies fail (or fail to explain changes in homicide rates), is that what works for one type of violence doesn’t work for the other.

In general, people vacillate between two major modes of thinking. One is fast, automatic, and intuitive. It’s why Tony shot Maria’s brother Bernardo in West Side Story. Road rage is another example. This quick, unthinking response is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1 thinking.” By contrast, “System 2 thinking” involves deliberation and careful planning in order to gain something—“cash or phone or watch or drug turf.” Often, revenge. And, again in West Side Story, it’s why Chino shoots Tony. The violence associated with System 2 thinking is a means to an end.

Unforgiving Places points out our criminal-justice system has been designed to counter planned and deliberate System 2 crimes, when the real problem is those spontaneous, reactive ones, the homicides that occur in a moment of irrationality. According to FBI data, they account for more than three-fourths of murders committed over the past twenty years. The Chicago Police Department estimates that argumentsare at the root of between 70 and 80 percent of homicides in that city. (Say, between husband and wife, employer and employee, or in the picture from the short Argentinian film “Till Death Do Us Part,” above, even bride and groom.)

Looking back over the crime book reviews I’ve written in the last few months, I find that when gun violence occurred in these stories, it is often of the more deliberate type, because the workings of the perpetrator’s mind are important to the story, the crime’s motivation, and its ultimate solution. But sometimes, both types occur: a spontaneous, “heat of the moment” crime leads to a chain of deliberate cover-up assassinations; or, conversely, tracking down the perpetrators of a well-planned crime leads to a deadly, reactive confrontation. But the two types of violence are definitely bifurcated in the way Ludwig describes, and the distinction between them makes perfect literary sense. Scott Turow’s recent novel, Presumed Guilty, is a good example of a crime thought to be a System 2 crime that turned out to be something very different.

A Murderous Reading Vacation–Right in Your Own Back Yard

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So your friends are off to the Jersey Shore or Thailand or the Maritime Provinces. You can have your own exciting vacation right from the ol’ lounge chair. Here are five recent crime stories that will give you a taste of sea, sand, and foreign climes.

Pele’s Prerogative by Albert Tucher
If a Hawai`i vacation is just what you need, you’ll find plenty of local color to make you think you’ve vacationed in that island paradise. Pele, you’ll recall, is the goddess of volcanoes and fire who created the Hawaiian Islands. The flowing lava creates lava tubes, akin to cave systems. Seventy-three-year-old Langston Otsaka, is found dead at the bottom of a lava tube in his back yard, and the wound on the back of his head suggests it wasn’t an accidental. Read my full review here.

Runaway Horses by the Italian literary duo Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini
Lawyer Enzo Maggioni and his wife Valeria, traveling to Siena, encounter a violent hailstorm, take a wrong turn, and end up at an enormous villa, where they remain guests for several days. They’ve arrived shortly before Siena’s August Palio, a centuries-old event in which horses race three laps around the town’s Piazza del Campo. The competition is vigorous and not always fair. Then there’s the dead jockey in the library. My full review is here.

Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
This story sneaks up on you and before long has its claws in you good and solid. From the moment Evie Gordon walks up to her clients’ quirky Southern California mansion and finds the front door wide open, you know she’s about to uncover something better avoided. A young woman is tied up inside, and Evie’s employers are dead. When suspicion falls on the two women, they go on the run across the US—a 2025 Thelma and Louise. Here’s the full review.

Sayulita Sucker by Craig Terlson
In this story, set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, you’ll visit back alleys and dicey neighborhoods not featured in any guidebook. Luke Fischer barrels through the pages as unstoppable as a locomotive. He’s not always polite, prefers beer to wine, and raises a dust storm wherever he goes. Yet, he has an uncanny knack for finding missing people. This time, his client is a man whose teenager daughter has disappeared. Full review here.

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
The acclaimed author’s first cozy mystery is a delight. Muriel Blossom, widowed and newly wealthy, has planned her first trip to Europe—Paris and a splurgy river cruise. You might suspect that Lippman has an older auntie or family friend who inspired her to so perfectly create open-hearted, naïve Mrs. Blossom. From the first page, you’ll peg her as the inevitable victim of an assortment of solicitous character. Read the full review.

reading, apple

Fair Haven

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Laury A. Egan’s new crime thriller, set in the suburban town of Fair Haven, dispels any notion you might have that the suburbs are dull. Fair Haven is an actual town in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and Egan grew up there, so while she describes its Jersey Shore locale with convincing authenticity, the residents’ shenanigans are, one hopes, wholly fictional.

Coincidentally, while reading this book, my husband and I found ourselves practically next door, attending the opening day of Monmouth Park Racetrack’s 2025 season. I kept glancing around at my fellow racing fans in search of doppelgangers for Egan’s lively characters! As Egan describes the area in a foreword, it’s a middle-income to wealthy year-round community with sailing, yacht clubs, the ocean, two rivers, and a rich history. Homicides, she says, are rare.

Maybe so, but she’s put a juicy one in Fair Haven. The protagonist is Chris Clarke, a professional photographer in her early 40s, who formerly worked for Monmouth County’s Forensic and Technical Services Bureau. Though she no longer works for them, the local police call her in when a staff overload leaves the Fair Haven Police with a dead body on their hands and no photographer.

The dead woman is Sally Ann Shaffer, a tennis pro at the Sycamore Country Club, who was electrocuted in her hot tub, and there is no shortage of suspects. It seems quite a few people, men and women alike, had sexual liaisons with Sally Ann. She may even have had her eye on a Roman Catholic priest, new in the community, who runs a summer tennis clinic for children of the parish.

Chris is in an intimate relationship with physical therapist Kate Morgan, and what I liked about this story is that Egan has made the sexuality of this couple and several other characters an integral part of the plot. Kate has been married and has a 14-year-old son, but one of the dilemmas she and Chris face is that the son doesn’t want to live with his mom as long as she’s with Chris. Too embarrassing.

Kate lost custody of her son in the divorce, when the judge received a letter from Sally Ann revealing that Kate is a lesbian. The hypocrisy eludes Kate’s ex-husband Harry, who drinks too much, and has been carrying on with Sally Ann for years. With justification, Kate wants their son back. Both of them end up among the several suspects in Sally Ann’s death.

There’s blackmail, thievery, fraud, assault, and more awaiting readers of this book. Although the characters engage in much antisocial behavior and hold quite a few prejudices, Chris is a likeable protagonist and remains the moral center of the story. I did feel that her old friend, Police Chief Mackie, and the department’s lead detective share more information with her than they should, but that does keep the story moving along briskly. While there are twists, they are all earned—Egan lays her groundwork well.

Queen of Diamonds

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This is the third in Beezy Marsh’s trilogy inspired by a real-life female shoplifting gang that operated in London in the first half of the twentieth century. The first two books, Queen of Thieves and Queen of Clubs, deal with the gang’s activities during their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, while this book describes how their leader—Alice Diamond—got her dubious start two decades earlier.

Alice, the future Queen of Diamonds, is an orphan working long hot hours in Pink’s Jam Factory. Aspiring to a better life, she shoplifts little indulgences for herself on her off-hours—silk stockings, colorful scarves, and the like. Alice’s story is interspersed with that of Mary Carr, another legendary leader of a real-life shoplifting gang whose career began several decades earlier. Mary grew up in one of London’s most notorious slums, Seven Dials.

In Marsh’s story, Mary is noticed by a Mayfair lady out slumming. She’s looking for subjects for her paintings of dirty, downtrodden, poverty-stricken children and finds Mary a perfect model for her art. By inviting the girl to her home and studio, the condescending Lady Harcourt exposes Mary to a completely different side of life, whetting her appetite for better things. Mary soon realizes she’s treated completely differently when she’s wearing Lady Harcourt’s daughter’s hand-me-downs than when dressed in her own dirty rags. From that point, there’s no going back for her.

Author Marsh evokes sympathy with her descriptions of the women’s sordid living conditions and unambitious, resentful family members. It isn’t surprising they aspire to glamour beyond the understanding of the people they grew up with. What’s remarkable is that both Mary and Alice are brash and determined enough to get it, with potential trouble with the authorities always right around the corner.

All that is fairly sociological. What about the story? It never flags and rests on the tremendous strength of the characters Marsh has created. She puts us right there, fingering those silks, decorating those bonnets, and running for our lives when the coppers appear.

Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.

In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. Gabriel has become a book author and travel writer, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames.

Now Gabriel is in Léopoldville (Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. A friend arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the prime minister, the controversial, pro-Soviet Patrice Lamumba—a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a “gold mine” of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that’s not true, and if it were, he’d know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel slides into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies, delivered most convincingly of all. Someone desperately wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed US, British, and Belgian government operatives were out to get him. He named names.

It’s an exciting read as Gabriel zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to another, and develops the self-preservation skills he seems increasingly likely to need. The story is packed with interesting, richly developed characters. Aside from Gabriel, there’s a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; an irritating Liverpool journalist; and a dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier doubted the official story about the deadly fire.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It’s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He’s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.

Christopher Bollen’s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She’s lost everything—husband, daughter—and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples’ lives and “fixing” their problems. Truth told, she’s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she’d get her comeuppance.

Probably you won’t expect her nemesis will turn out to be an eight-year-old boy. Otto Seeber is cunning, fearless, and the orchestrator of much of the havoc that descends on the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. (This fictional hotel was in part inspired by Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile. I’ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen’s characters.)

Only Maggie—and her archaeologist friend Ben—see through Otto’s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben’s husband, Zachary, having a belated stirring of paternal interest, draws the boy into their circle, and Maggie cannot avoid Otto. He has her in his sights and keeps her there.

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto’s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It’s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s writing.

Bollen’s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, “romantic” place, but an unfamiliar world. The rules are different there. Things can go wrong. And do. Maggie is a completely believable, if not completely likeable character. I thought I understood her and her flaws, but in the end, Bollen has some revelations in store that may lead you to reevaluate her. In short, Havoc is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.