{"id":11392,"date":"2025-03-24T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11392"},"modified":"2025-03-23T18:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-03-23T22:14:11","slug":"gabriels-moon-havoc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11392","title":{"rendered":"Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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In Gabriel\u2019s Moon<\/em>, the new espionage thriller<\/a> by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now Gabriel is in L\u00e9opoldville (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\u2014a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a \u201cgold mine\u201d of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that\u2019s not true, and if it were, he\u2019d know it. Of course, it is <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/em>; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo\u2014Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It\u2019s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd\u2019s writing is top-notch. He\u2019s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Christopher Bollen\u2019s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc<\/em><\/a> is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She\u2019s lost everything\u2014husband, daughter\u2014and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples\u2019 lives and \u201cfixing\u201d their problems. Truth told, she\u2019s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she\u2019d get her comeuppance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Probably you won\u2019t 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\u2019s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile<\/em>. I\u2019ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen\u2019s characters.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only Maggie\u2014and her archaeologist friend Ben\u2014see through Otto\u2019s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto\u2019s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It\u2019s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bollen\u2019s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, \u201cromantic\u201d 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<\/em> is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield. In Gabriel\u2019s 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,61,52,193,126,66,32],"tags":[2086,2268],"class_list":["post-11392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-character","category-crime","category-espionage","category-reading-2","category-suspense","category-thriller","tag-christopher-bollen","tag-william-boyd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2XK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11396,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11392\/revisions\/11396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}