The lioness

Chris Bohjalian, 1962-

Large print - 2022

"A luxurious African safari turns deadly for a Hollywood starlet and her entourage in this riveting historical thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant"--

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Subjects
Genres
Thrillers (Fiction)
Historical fiction
Published
New York, NY : Random House Large Print [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Chris Bohjalian, 1962- (author)
Edition
First large print edition
Physical Description
xii, 444 pages (large print) ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780593607794
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Katie Barstow, Hollywood's hottest young actress, plans her honeymoon as a Serengeti safari and invites her brother, sister-in-law, and a coterie of industry friends and colleagues to come along. It's the mid-1960s, and the pampered travelers drop into a world roiled by geopolitical crises as the grip of colonialism is being challenged by Native uprisings, each side manipulated by Russian and U.S. counterintelligence agencies mired in escalating Cold War tensions. No sooner do their guides set up camp then they are overtaken by kidnappers, and those who are not immediately killed or tortured are taken hostage. The travelers are oblivious to these outside forces, however, and naively cling to the belief that rescue is at hand. She's Katie Barstow, after all. The novel's opening action may burst forth with a deadly ambush but Bohjalian doesn't blindside loyal readers who have come to expect his signature combination of exotic locations, titillating characters, and energetic pacing. Stark and dark, violent and vivid, this may be versatile Bohjalian's most harrowing work since Skeletons of the Feast (2008). Intimately researched, the Serengeti's beauty and brutality are vibrantly infused in every scene, a grounding counterpoint to the competing dynamics of human cruelty and compassion.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In 1964, Hollywood star Katie Barstow and her Rodeo Drive gallerist husband head to Tanzania for a safari honeymoon, along with an assortment of family and friends, in this devastatingly cunning suspense novel from bestseller Bohjalian (Hour of the Witch). The group includes Katie's psychologist brother and sister-in-law, an agent, a publicist, an actor and her screenwriter husband, and Katie's costar in a scandalous film. Shepherded by a private guide in Land Rovers in the Serengeti, they take photos of giraffes, elephants, lions, and wildebeests, while a slew of porters and cooks provide such amenities as waterproof canvas bathtubs, a kerosene-powered ice maker, and a sufficient supply of gin and tonic. The idyll for Katie and crew comes to an end after they become the target of Russian mercenaries, who hold them captive in abandoned huts. Worse follows, including fatal snake bites. Bohjalian does a superb job of judiciously rolling out information of how past transgressions may have led to the heart-stopping episodes of chaos and carnage as the shocking, twist-filled plot builds up to the revelation of "the real reasons for the safari nightmare." This brilliant whydunit is not to be missed. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Set in the tumultuous Africa of the 1960s, this book tells the story of a safari gone horribly wrong. The guests are a Hollywood star and her new husband, along with her brother, sister-in-law, and some famous friends. Katie Barstow, the star bankrolling the Serengeti trip, expects a fantastic photo safari filled with as much luxury as is possible camping in the wild. It starts out a lovely experience, with giraffes, wildebeests and bucolic sights of other grazing animals. But then, the group is kidnapped by a team of Russians. The party is separated. The guards are gone, and each member of the safari must confront their personal demons in the attempt to survive. Bohjalian (Hour of the Witch) also tackles serious topics of then and today, including homophobia, racism, animal cruelty, and East-West politics. Narrators January LaVoy, Grace Experience, and Gabrielle De Cuir do an excellent job voicing the large cast of characters. VERDICT This is a good read, full of adventure and with twists aplenty.--Cheryl Youse

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An actress and her entourage are kidnapped by Russians in Bohjalian's uneven thriller. In 1964, Hollywood's gossip rags are agog as movie star Katie Barstow marries gallerist David Hill and takes her inner circle along on her honeymoon. And an adventuresome honeymoon it is--on safari in the Serengeti with aging big-game hunter Charlie Patton, who once helped Hemingway bag trophies. But Katie is not the star of this ensemble piece. The populous cast--a who's who at the beginning is indispensable--includes Katie's publicist, Reggie Stout; her agent, Peter Merrick; her best friend, Carmen Tedesco, a supporting actress who plays wisecracking sidekicks; and Terrance Dutton, Katie's recent co-star, a Black actor who's challenging Sidney Poitier's singularity in Hollywood. With obvious nods to Hemingway's worst fear--masculine cowardice--Bohjalian adds in Felix Demeter, Carmen's husband, a B-list screenwriter who reminds his wife of Hemingway's weakling Francis Macomber. Felix seems a superfluous double of David, who feels inadequate because Katie is the breadwinner and his father is CIA. Then there's Katie's older brother, Billy Stepanov, whose abuse at the hands of their mother shaped the psychologist he is today; Billy's pregnant wife, Margie; and Benjamin Kikwete, an apprentice safari guide. Thus, a proliferation of voices whose competing perspectives fragment rather than advance the story. The kidnapping plot seems less designed to test each character's mettle than to exercise Bohjalian's predilection for minute descriptions of gore. The most heartfelt portrayal here is of the Serengeti and its flora and fauna, but none of the human characters net enough face time to transcend their typecasting. The motives behind the kidnapping might have lent intrigue to the proceedings, but foreshadowing is so slight that the infodump explainer at the end leaves us shocked, mostly at how haphazard the plot is. Perhaps A-list screenwriters will be able to spin TV gold from this sketchy treatment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter One Katie Barstow Hollywood royalty gathered Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Katie Barstow wed Rodeo Drive gallerist David Hill. The two of them left afterward for Paris and then the wilds of Africa on a "safari." Rumor has it that the actress is bringing along an entourage into the jungle that will include her brother and sister-in-law, Billy and Margie Stepanov; her agent, Peter Merrick; her publicist, Reggie Stout; actress Carmen Tedesco and her husband, Felix Demeter; and Katie's friend and co-star in the still controversial Tender Madness, Terrance Dutton. The little group has nicknamed themselves the Lions of Hollywood--though anyone who knows Katie Barstow or has seen her on the screen understands that she is the lioness in charge of this pride. --The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964 She was watching the giraffes at the watering hole after breakfast, no longer as awed by their presence as she'd been even four days ago, when she'd first seen a great herd of them eating leaves from a copse of tall umbrella acacia, their heads occasionally bobbing up to stare back, unfazed and not especially alarmed by the humans. Their eyes were sweet. Their horns were the antennae on a child's extraterrestrial Halloween mask. The inscrutable creatures were wary of these humans, but they felt no need to flee. They'd just finished breakfast and were still at their camp. Her husband, David, was on her left, and her brother, Billy, was on her right. Both had their cameras out. Terrance was sitting nearby with his notebook on his knees, sketching the creatures. Katie had known that Terrance was as talented a visual artist as he was an actor--her husband loved his paintings--but she was still stunned by how quickly and how remarkably he was drawing the animals they saw. The eyes of his elephant had broken her heart. Earlier that autumn, when they were still in L.A., David had said it was only a matter of time before he could risk giving the man a show. ("He's a movie star," she told David when she heard the hesitation in his voice. "He's a Black movie star," David had reminded her, and while he was only acknowledging the backlash he might face from some quarters, she had still felt the need to remind him it was 1964, not 1864. His gallery's fiscal foundation couldn't possibly be so weak that it couldn't withstand blowback from racist critics and so-called connoisseurs.) The group, all nine of them and their guides, were about to climb into the Land Rovers and start the drive to the next camp, a journey through the savanna that would take three hours if they didn't stop, but would, in fact, take seven or eight because they expected to pause often for the Serengeti's great menagerie of animals. You just never knew what you would see and where you might detour. Yesterday, they had been particularly lucky. They had witnessed the great wildebeest crossing at the Mara River: thousands of wildebeest and zebras storming down the sandy banks into the water and attempting to reach the grass on the other side. There were five giraffes this morning, three with their legs splayed awkwardly as they stretched their long necks down to the water to drink. She felt a small pang of guilt that she was taking for granted her witness to their presence, animals over fifteen feet tall--their legs alone were taller than she was--with their cream-colored coats and those iconic tawny spots. She wondered at the way her mind was wandering instead to the differences between coincidence and synchronicity. Her brother, Billy, a psychologist, had been expounding on the two words over breakfast in the meal tent. A coincidence, he had said, was the fact that there were nine Americans on this photo safari, and last month two had been caught in the same end-of-the-world traffic jam that brought freeway traffic to a standstill before the Beatles' appearance at the Hollywood Bowl: Katie's husband and Katie's agent. Though David Hill was nearly thirty years younger than Peter Merrick, the idea that they had turned off their engines and stood smoking Lucky Strikes on the highway beside their cars at almost exactly the same moment near almost exactly the same exit had still been fascinating enough that it had broken the ice their first night in the Serengeti, and led David and Peter to bond in ways that transcended the generation and a half that separated them. (It also gave them something less awkward to discuss than the reality that Katie Barstow, their more obvious commonality, made dramatically more money than either of them, or that they were two big, strapping men who depended upon the earning power of a one-hundred-pound woman with a childhood more freakish than fairy tale who was barely five feet tall.) Synchronicity was something more profound, a connection that suggested a higher power was at work. In this case--on this safari--it was the idea that on their second afternoon in the savanna, one of their guides overheard two of the guests discussing Katie's latest film and the MGM lion that was the first thing a person saw in the theater, and on a hunch drove the Land Rover to the far side of a tremendous outcropping of boulders, one of the kopjes not far from their camp, and there they were: a female lion and four of her cubs. Regal and proud, the cubs content, all of them lounging in the grass beneath the trees that grew beside the rocks. Even when the second vehicle had roared up behind the first so that everyone could see the animals and snap their photos, the mother lion had done little more than yawn. The cubs looked on a bit more intently, slightly more curious, but since their mother wasn't alarmed, they merely rolled over, stretched their small arms with deceptively large paws, and found more comfortable positions in the grass. The two Land Rovers were barely a dozen yards from the lioness. "Katie?" She turned now toward David. "I think we need to bring a few home," her husband said, motioning at the giraffes at the watering hole. "And a couple of zebras. We'd never need a lawn service." "The zebras would certainly help. But giraffes don't eat grass," she reminded him. They'd just bought a ranch. Or, to be precise, she had just bought a ranch. Thirty acres. It was near Santa Clarita, north of the valley. She'd considered buying something in Malibu, but she'd grown up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a theater kid born to theater parents, and now that she was--and the words simultaneously made her bask and cringe--a movie star, she wanted to steer clear of the mod world that these days marked the sands: the beach houses with their massive windows, circular fireplaces, and Peter Max paintings against the crisp, white walls. She imagined someday she might have a horse. Or horses. One would be lonely. She'd ridden horses in two different movies and enjoyed the experience. She'd felt horrible when she'd watched her stunt double put the animal through some terrifying gallops and then send it to its knees after the creature was, supposedly, shot. "Point noted," David agreed. Beside them, her brother, Billy, was photographing the giraffes with a camera that had a lens so stout it looked to Katie like a club, and his wife, Margie, was staring at the giraffes through binoculars so delicate they reminded Katie of opera glasses. Billy was thirty-five, David's age and five years her senior, and Margie was thirty-three. Margie had found out she was pregnant in August, and her doctor had thought morning sickness alone was a reason why she shouldn't go on the safari, but she was game. Said she wouldn't miss it. This was both her brother's and Margie's second marriage. Billy had a four-year-old son at home from his first, but Margie had left no children in her wake when her previous marriage had imploded. Katie knew that she was supposed to want children, and speculated sometimes what it meant that she didn't. Perhaps she was too ambitious. Or immature. Or selfish. Perhaps it was her hatred of her own parents, who had made her career possible, and yet had also been mercenary and mean and fake. And, yes, cruel. They had not been cruel to each other, which in hindsight was rather surprising, but they had been cruel to Billy and her. (Billy, however, had borne the brunt of the abuse. Most of the real horrors had been inflicted upon him, and it was their mother who was behind the lion's share of that carnage. How Billy had wound up who he was, rather than whoever was strangling all those women in Boston, was a mystery to her. But, thank God, he had wound up a pretty gentle therapist instead of a pretty violent monster.) Katie's team at the studio, her publicist, and her agent all expected that someday soon she and David would have a baby. And most of them had mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, at thirty she was already outgrowing "starlet": how many more times could she play the ingenue? Besides, now that she was married, it would be unnatural not to have a baby. What would her fans think? On the other hand, most of her entourage disliked the idea of her taking time off, given the box office bullion of everything she touched. Even Tender Madness, her movie with Terrance, had done well, despite the inference in one of the scenes at the mental hospital that the pair had kissed after the cut. (They had, though the moment had wound up on the cutting room floor.) Reggie Stout was the lone exception: he honestly seemed to want only what she wanted. He was far more to her than a publicist and she put considerably more stock in his counsel than she did in even her agent's--and she trusted Peter Merrick a very great deal. Reggie seemed as invested in her future and her happiness as a real father might be, though this was supposition since some days she hoped desperately that Roman Stepanov was not her real father. Even now, she and her brother, Billy, joked that both of them were babies who had been swapped out at birth, and they weren't really related to the two grown-ups who had pretended to be their parents. She had chosen Billy to walk her down the aisle the week before last, since her own father had died last year within days of Jack Kennedy, though in far less dramatic circumstances. He'd had a heart attack in a cab on the way home from the theater. The cabbie, at her mother's direction, had turned around and raced to St. Luke's, but her father was dead by the time he was wheeled into the emergency room. The New York papers would have devoted more space than they did to the Broadway icon's death, but the president took precedent. Katie was grateful, because the last thing she would have wanted that horrible week was to do press with her mother and have to feign grief. She was a good actress--but not that good. Billy was convinced she had chosen movies over the stage, which was the family business, because it meant that she was usually at least three time zones away from their mother, a woman he once called "a singular rarity: a cold-blooded mammal." Both siblings detested her. They had disliked their father, with reason, but they had loathed their mother--though, arguably, Billy had greater cause than Katie. "This is when the giraffe is most vulnerable," Emmanuel, their African guide, was saying, his accent sounding both British and Maasai to Katie. "How much does a giraffe's neck weigh?" he asked good-naturedly. He was easily seventy, and he was like a schoolteacher with these Americans. He didn't merely want them to see the Serengeti: he wanted them to understand it. It was a world that he loved and a world he loved sharing. "Easily six hundred pounds," Katie answered. She was the only one of the nine guests who'd never been to college, and she understood it was a little pathetic the way she always had to be first with the correct answer. But she did. She needed Emmanuel's approval. Carmen was like that, too, though she had been to college. In her case, Katie supposed, it was because Carmen always played supporting roles: she was usually the leading lady's best friend or sister, the gal with a couple of memorable wisecracks but never the sort of scene that allowed her to show off real acting chops. Being the smartest woman in the room was her way of compensating. "Good, good," Emmanuel was reassuring her. "It takes time to look up and look around. That's why they don't all drink at once." "And their legs," Katie said. "They're in no position to run." "No," Emmanuel agreed. "Excellent." David put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him. He whispered into her ear, "Thank you." She turned from the giraffes to her husband. They'd now been married thirteen days. They'd honeymooned alone--in style and civilization--in Paris, before meeting the other seven guests she was bringing on safari at the airport outside Paris and flying to Nairobi. Now they were still traveling in style and in a most civilized fashion--the kerosene-powered ice maker the excursion company provided awed her, because, of course, you had to have a proper gin and tonic at the end of a long day on safari--though the civilization was provided by an entourage of seventeen Kenyans and Tanzanians (including two armed rangers), sixteen of whom were Black. The exception was Charlie Patton, no relation, he pointedly told everyone as soon as he was introduced, to the American general. Patton had once been one of the great white hunters, born to colonials at the very end of the nineteenth century--he still had the sort of handlebar moustache she associated with cavalry officers from another era--but he had figured out the real money now was with the likes of movie stars such as Katie Barstow. People who wanted to photograph elephants, not shoot them. People who might want a zebra rug or a zebra purse but didn't want to see the damn thing actually killed. "Thank you for what?" she asked David, turning from the guide to her husband. She spoke softly in response to his whisper. The camera loved it when she spoke quietly, and directors had often told her that her voice, when she murmured, was gold. "For this," he said. "For bringing me here. For bringing us here." She took his fingers that were on her shoulder and brought them to her lips. She kissed them. Though David was her first husband, three years ago she had been briefly engaged. That fellow--that actor--had been threatened by her bank account. Not by her, but by her box office grosses. She had broken it off when he disappeared, drunk, the night of the Wild Girl premiere. He ended up going to Italy to lick his wounds and be the bad guy in bad films: Gunfight in Bloody Sands and The Smoking Winchester. Her brother the shrink had warned her that it would be difficult to find a man she might actually love who would ever be completely comfortable with her success, unless he were at least as successful. But men like that? They were rare. Grace Kelly had had to marry an honest-to-God prince. Elizabeth Taylor had just married her fifth husband, Richard Burton, an actor whose star was as bright as hers, even if the movies weren't the blockbusters that Liz's were. Excerpted from The Lioness: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.