Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard to portray since it involves a form of chaos irreconcilable with the resolutions we find in any thriller worth its salt. Havoc (The Borough Press, £16.99), by the American writer Christopher Bollen, is a remarkable exception, with the added bonus of being brilliantly written.
Maggie Burkhardt is an 81-year-old widow who has spent the six years since her husband’s death living in a succession of resort hotels. We now find her installed in the grandly named but slightly shabby Royal Karnak Hotel in Luxor. There she has ample opportunity to indulge her favourite pastime of intruding into people’s business – the result, she assures us, of her ‘insatiable need to help others’. Identifying a couple whose marriage she decides is unsustainable, Maggie embarks on a disruptive campaign, facilitated by pilfering a maid’s pass-key that allows her to place an incriminating scarf in a bedroom where it doesn’t belong.
This chicanery coincides with the arrival of new guests – a smart young woman with her eight-year-old son in tow. The boy, Otto, is savvy well beyond his years and almost majestically malign. He soon cottons on to Maggie’s sadistic contrivances, and blackmails her into paying for an upgrade at the hotel for himself and his mother. When he increases his demands to include an XT Megabox games system, Maggie decides to turn the tables on him, but soon finds herself in a dangerous contest, as each of them works to discredit the other.
The battle manages to be both gripping and hilarious as other characters, including a gay couple Maggie befriends by the hotel swimming pool, prove unwitting accomplices in the struggle.
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