This tale starts with Agatha Christie vibes, but slips ever closer to Poe

Rarely has there been a less reliable narrator in fiction than Maggie Burkhardt, the 81-year-old protagonist of Christopher Bollen’s profoundly unsettling “Havoc.” Past Bollen novels have recalled such darkly ingenious writers as Patricia Highsmith — especially 2020’s “A Beautiful Crime,” which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. But this time around, Bollen has opted less for devious elegance and more for outright derangement, and the result is a hair-raising plunge into a deteriorating mind.

Maggie is an octogenarian who lived happily in Wisconsin with her husband, Peter, until his death following a seven-month hospitalization. Soon thereafter, their daughter, Julia, also died, and Maggie escaped to Europe in an effort to outrun her despair. Several years into her self-imposed exile, she arrives at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor, Egypt, having fled the Swiss Alps for a reason not immediately revealed but that prompted her to dramatically alter her appearance.

When the novel opens, Maggie has already spent three months at the Royal Karnak, where she’s become comfy amid COVID lockdown and intends to take permanent refuge. The fictional establishment (Bollen modeled it on the real-life Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor, in whose rooms Agatha Christie wrote parts of “Death on the Nile”) is a once-luxurious British colonial-era hotel whose glamour has faded but which still boasts elements of the good life. It’s situated on the banks of the Nile, a stone’s throw from the Valley of Kings, where Maggie has spent many hours exploring treasure-filled royal tombs, despite her “clicking hip bones” and “wormy” ankles. “The artisans and tomb builders of the New Kingdom,” she pronounces, “were the alpha and omega of awe. They alone could make the gods jealous.”

She’s managed to insinuate her way into the good graces of staff and fellow “long hauler” guests, especially hotel manager Ahmed and married couple Zachary and Ben, who are there courtesy of Ben’s work as an Egyptologist. To them Maggie is merely a harmless confidante.

What we quickly learn about our lead character, though, is that she is unwilling to accept the maxim that the older you get, the more invisible you become. She’s the resident busybody who’s partially channeled her grief into a newfound “compulsion” to fix what she perceives as broken, or, as she puts it: “I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. … I change people’s lives for the better whether they see it that way or not.”

If that sounds ominous, your instincts are correct.

Maggie’s nose for disharmony leads her to newly arrived hotel guests Tess and her odd-ish 8-year-old son, Otto, just in from Paris. Maggie immediately discerns that Tess is in crisis and targets her as her next project. Tess is in Egypt without her husband, Alain, a television producer in France who intends to soon join his wife and son. When he doesn’t, Maggie concocts a plan to keep the couple apart to “save” Tess. But she soon realizes that the facade of maternal concern that has enabled her to pull off her past schemes may be fooling Tess and just about everyone else, but it isn’t convincing Otto, a character straight out of “The Omen.”

Maggie believes herself to be unrivaled in her ability to wreak havoc via an insinuation here or a planted item of lingerie there, but in Otto she’s met her match, and before long, their vicious cat-and-mouse game turns lethal. It’s a tit for tat in which one act of violence is met with another more outrageous. And the contest over which of them will break first has the effect of emboldening Otto but destabilizing Maggie, whose daily exercise routine, anti-anxiety meds and carefully constructed exterior had thus far saved her from unraveling.

Throughout, the author drops hints that prompt skepticism in Maggie as a narrator. As she becomes more and more unhinged, it occurs that even she may no longer know what the truth is. For her “the world has become a nightmare … splintering at every edge.”

Bollen can be counted on to choreograph taut, nail-biting scenes and deliver richly atmospheric descriptive passages that immediately bring a person or place to vivid life. The Royal Karnak “is constructed like an accordion … with each side wing stretching out in a wide curve”; Maggie wakes “in the blue hour before sunrise when the whole world seems wrapped in gauze”; the hotel sofas are “bony”; the sunsets fall “like a blush over the hotel’s pale Victorian face.” Yet for all his panache, I wish this author had been kinder to his protagonist, who leaves little room for sympathy or understanding. Or maybe that’s the point?

There is a twist at the very end that hints at why Maggie is so haunted by her memories that she may have lost her grip on reality. It’s a devilish denouement that marks Bollen as a thriller master, even as he edges into the macabre.

Leigh Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.