When an elderly busybody/killer meets a young bad seed, ‘Havoc’ ensues

It takes only a few pages for red flags to mount in Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller, “Havoc.”

When we meet Maggie Burkhardt, the pandemic is raging and, for the previous three months, the 81-year-old has lived at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor, Egypt.

The Wisconsinite has been traveling ever since her husband died six years earlier. She’s stayed in 18 hotels in that time, and the Royal Karnak is the only one she has considered home: “My plan is to stay forever.”

Then the red flags start flapping: Maggie barely recognizes herself these days and not only because she’s dyed her hair black “after my escape from the Alps.” Escape?

The next one snaps as plot breezes pick up: “Despite the unseasonable heat and the return of my uncontrollable compulsion, I have been extremely happy at the Royal Karnak.” “Uncontrollable compulsion”? Maggie isn’t coy. She likes to “help” people, so much so that the urge wakes her up at night, itching at her brain until the only thing left to do is to give it a good scratch.

And then a third flag begins violently slapping in the wind: “I change people’s lives for the better,” Maggie says. “Only once did my actions end for the worst. But I don’t like to think about the murder.”

Dun, dun, duuuuun …!

But Bollen isn’t content to follow the diabolical busybody as she upends vacationers’ lives. Maggie must meet her match, and in a stroke of near genius, he makes her nemesis an 8-year-old American named Otto.“ A “skinny, quiet nothing of a boy,” Maggie deems him, who wears “a pair of dirty round glasses” and whose giant ears catch the light from the hotel lobby window, turning the cartilage the orange-ish color of apricots.

Admittedly, an adult and a child going toe to toe can make for queasy reading; some scenes verge on the abusive. It helps that the author of “A Beautiful Crime” sketches Otto as preternaturally devious, and Maggie so deserving of comeuppance that it’s quite delicious to see her bested.

But (isn’t there always a but?) Bollen is sneaky. He allows Maggie to bring us into her confidence — “You might not agree with my tactics. Judge me all you want, but I think it’s healthy to test others” — as if Bollen is saying that by simply reading the book we are complicit, too. So maybe she’s relatable after all?

He knows when and how to ratchet up the sympathy. Maggie has no family. Her life is nearing its end, she’s alone in a country that she can’t easily leave (COVID has made travel impossible) and where would she go anyway? Then this kid waltzes in and upsets Maggie’s apple cart. How dare he, the little brat?

Bollen also knows when to back off, allowing Maggie to show how truly dangerous she is and that maybe she’s not as good at her “trade” as she professes to be. Bollen is, though, and how enjoyable it is to watch him work.

Maren Longbella is a Star Tribune multi-platform editor.

Havoc

By: Christopher Bollen.

Publisher: Harper, 256 pages, $30.