Deranged tricks

The chaos agents who drive Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller belong to two of the most easily overlooked demographics: an old woman and a child. The yawning age gap between the eighty-one-year-old narrator, Maggie Burkhardt, and her eight-year-old antagonist allows for an entertaining, if sometimes perplexing, intergenerational feud that unspools at an Egyptian hotel during the Covid-19 pandemic. At a time when borders are closed and death is never far away, these two fearsome characters use their perceived vulnerability to their advantage in satisfyingly shocking ways.

The reason Maggie is there, of all places, is the first mystery. It has been five years since she left Wisconsin after the deaths of her husband and daughter, fleeing the loneliness of her empty house to hop around the grand old hotels of Europe. She is drawn to these places because they are full of people who recognize her as a “physical entity that takes up space”, rather than an invisible old lady. In Egypt, she has befriended the hotel manager and she ends her days by ringing a bell to summon other guests to witness the sunset. It’s an idyllic retirement, except when her “uncontrollable compulsion” to intervene in people’s dysfunctional relationships flares up. She has nothing but the best intentions, of course. “Only once did my actions end for the worse,” she acknowledges, “but I don’t like to talk about the murder.”

That’s all in the past, however, until eight-year-old Otto Seeber shows up with his mother and catches Maggie’s attention with his intelligence. After he sees her planting a scarf in another guest’s room in the hope of splitting up a couple, he blackmails her into paying for a room upgrade for him and his mother. The war escalates from here, with the antagonists playing increasingly deranged tricks on each other as the collateral damage mounts. Almost throughout, Maggie comes across as a trustworthy, even sympathetic old woman: her family tragedy and her witty observations of her fellow hotel dwellers make her more devious machinations easier to stomach. As her antipsychotic drug intake becomes more erratic, however, the holes in her story become harder to ignore. “Madness too is a form of protection”, she observes, “a suit of armor to ward off calls for reason and proportion.”

The author excels at ratcheting up Maggie’s unreliability until her suit of armour falls apart in dramatic, if hastily sketched, fashion. A few too many unanswered questions remain, but it is easy to forgive these omissions while revelling in such a distinctively deluded character.

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