Review by Booklist Review
Elderly widow Maggie Burkhardt traveled aimlessly until COVID-19 restrictions settled her at Luxor's Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. T here, Maggie has created a found family and decided to stay permanently. Trusted and loved, Maggie feels safe to satisfy her secret compulsion to free people of their doomed, damaging relationships (despite hinting that her projects have recently had deadly outcomes). Maggie's Karnak idyll is threatened when Otto, an unsettlingly sharp eight-year-old, catches her red-handed, planting evidence of an affair she's certain will nudge a woman to leave her self-absorbed husband. Otto shrewdly leverages the furor surrounding the wife's dramatic departure to blackmail Maggie, and her heavy-handed retaliation ignites a savage battle of wills. Everyone at the hotel is a potential weapon, and Maggie and Otto are evenly matched in manipulative prowess and stunted scruples. As Maggie loses control, she lets clues about her hidden past slip, lending a dark edge to her plans. Maggie's confidential narrative is instantly absorbing, evolving from snarky, grandmotherly observations to spiteful accusations, and cloaking the impropriety of targeting an eight-year-old foe in Maggie's obsession with protecting her newfound home. Fans of Helene Tursten's Elderly Lady (beginning with An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, 2018) reality-warping psychological thrillers will delight in this twisty original.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
An octogenarian Wisconsin widow faces off against an eight-year-old troublemaker in this first-rate tale of psychological suspense from Bollen (The Lost Americans). At the height of the Covid lockdown, the garrulous Maggie Burkhardt basks in her self-appointed role as social director for the guests at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor, Egypt--that is, until the arrival of young Otto Seeber and his mother. Though the scrawny, bespectacled Otto looks innocent, Maggie soon learns there's more to the boy than meets the eye. When Otto spies Maggie sneaking out of another guest's room, he offers to trade his silence for her agreement to upgrade him and his mother from the hotel's worst room to a $900-a-night luxury suite. So begins a dangerous chess match between the unlikely adversaries, each of whom is refreshingly drawn against type. As the mayhem mounts and the plot careens toward a genuinely shocking climax, Maggie's reliability as a narrator comes into doubt. Enriching the narrative with an evocative sense of atmosphere and playful riffs on The Bad Seed and Agatha Christie, Bollen serves up a nasty treat. It's a bracing ode to bad behavior. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Dec.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Thelma meetsThe Bad Seed meetsThe White Lotus in this Covid-19-era tale of an elderly American woman's murderous obsession with a troubled young boy at an Egyptian hotel. The 81-year-old Maggie Burkhardt left her home in Wisconsin six years ago following the deaths of her husband and daughter. Moving from hotel to hotel, she spent five years in the Alps, where she perfected her unseemly skill at insinuating herself into people's lives to cause the breakup of what she deems bad marriages. "I liberate people who don't know they're stuck," says the widow, whose methods include planting false evidence of infidelities and relating false rumors. After both partners in one targeted marriage die--the wife by strangling, the husband by suicide--and suspicions point Maggie's way, she escapes to Luxor and picks up where she left off. Convincing her fellow hotel guests that she is a kindly old lady, she sets her sights on a young American woman, Tess, only to find her hands full with Tess' psychologically damaged 8-year-old, Otto. He incurs Maggie's wrath with stunts like stealing a precious ribboned lock of her husband's hair and pretending to be her late daughter on the phone. Taking heavy doses of antipsychotic drugs, she becomes determined to kill the boy. Guests who threaten to expose her turn up dead. Others are arrested for crimes they didn't commit. Returning to the setting of his gripping novelThe Lost Americans (2023), Bollen takes the art of the unreliable, self-deluded narrator to new heights. Did Maggie really have a happy marriage? Did her family really die? Is she really 81? (All the physical stuff she must do would suggest someone younger.) The ending of the novel is a bit slack, leaving plot strings untied. But it's still a wicked delight. A devious and deranged thriller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
