The Destroyers

April 17, 2017
In the third novel from the author of Orient, Ian Bledsoe flies to the Greek island of Patmos, “the quiet island of the Apocalypse,” after the death of his father to try to get financial help from his childhood best friend, Charlie Konstantinou. Both young men come from affluent New York families but find themselves in precarious positions with their family inheritances. On the island, Ian meets Charlie’s cluster of extravagant friends, including his college girlfriend, vacationing on her summer off from law school. When Charlie offers Ian a job at his yacht company, things begin to start looking up, despite the appearance of more and more dubious individuals, including a group of religious hippies, around the touristy island. Suddenly, Charlie goes missing and it becomes Ian’s job to find his friend. Bollen manages to create a novel that is equal parts literary and thrilling. His beautiful sentences linger, and each of his characters have rich, complicated pasts that unfold over time. Though the ending is a bit rushed and leaves some loose threads, the novel ultimately offers a cinematic and insightful reflection on wealth and the horrendous things it can drive people to do, even to the ones they love. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.

April 1, 2017
When a childhood game takes on grown-up dimensions, you just know that things aren't going to go well. So it is in this latest thriller of the 1 percent by Interview editor Bollen (Orient, 2015, etc.).Ian Bledsoe once had aspirations to be Richie Rich, but when a seethingly hateful dad failed to deliver on his deathbed, he's wound up without drachmas or pesos to rub together. It's a good thing, then, that he's found a niche in the world doing humanitarian work in the rubble left by the class war, the war on drugs, the war on terror, and every other struggle imaginable. Longtime friend Charalambos Konstantinou--"Charlie" to his non-Greek friends--has different troubles: someone may be gunning for him, given that a bomb has gone off near his yacht and given that his various enterprises seem to involve some of the rubble-making mayhem that Ian has seen up close. So it is that just before the two get together for the first time in five years, Ian finds himself thinking of something Charlie once said: "The only redeeming quality left in a New Yorker is their ability not to take up space." The erstwhile New Yorker proves adept in not taking up space indeed: he disappears, and Ian follows clues through swaths of Greeks, Turks, Cypriots, Arabs, and Eurotrash, encountering testy Orthodox monks, grim Interpol suspects, and a heaving-breasted former schoolmate ("her palm prints are etched on my rib cage as if I were a window she was frantically trying to open"). Nobody depicts disaffected rich people quite as well as Bollen ("It's still too hot for Krakow and there's so much August left. I was thinking Stromboli, or Biarritz, or maybe Sharm el-Sheikh. A friend has a house in Tenerife"), an eminently worthy heir to Patricia Highsmith. If the story goes on a touch too long and has perhaps one too many supporting characters to follow, it makes for a satisfying, literate thriller. At once gritty, sandy, and silky--good reading for the beach or a yacht, too.

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April 1, 2017

Bollen, author of the tightly woven mystery Orient, switches gears with this atmospheric third novel, a slow-building, literary motorbike ride down steep Greek hillsides. The plot meanders, eventually threading through a tangle of side streets, hidden cul-de-sacs, and dead ends before emerging, cleanly, into a revved-up final quarter. Ian Bledsoe is on the run--from family, from circumstance, but most of all, from himself. His best childhood friend, Charlie Konstantinou, offers him a place to land on the island paradise of Patmos. But neither Patmos nor Charlie are what they appear to be. Ian becomes entangled in a real-life version of Destroyers, the game he and Charlie played as children. The writing is sharp, languid, and lovely, and the first-person point of view is a narrowly focused beam that eventually grows to encompass the entirety of the island. VERDICT Current events, including the plight of refugees and descriptions of terrorist acts, add depth and give the story a "torn from the headlines" feel. The slow build of the plot and reveal of the characters will appeal to readers of literary thrillers and Byzantine mysteries.--Charli Osborne, Oak Park P.L., MI

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