Cracking the cover of a Christopher Bollen novel is a guaranteed door into a new world, even if it’s one you think you already know. His stories, always credible, suspenseful, and filled with engaging characters, have so many unexpected twists that you can’t guess the ending. You don’t want it to be finished when you turn the last page because getting there was so gripping.
Certainly, that’s all true for Bollen’s latest novel, The Lost Americans. Set largely in Cairo, Egypt, it follows the quest of Cate Castle, a stubborn and fiery New Yorker, as she pursues the truth about her brother’s death. Did Eric commit suicide by jumping off his hotel balcony, which his employer and the Egyptian government too quickly conclude he did? To Cate, it doesn’t make sense. She was close to her brother and doubts the claims that he’d grown moody enough to take his own life. The lack of thoroughness in the Egyptians’ investigation raises even more questions, leading Cate to go to Cairo to begin her own investigation.
Eric had been a technical specialist for Polestar, a major arms manufacturer that provides weapons to Egypt, other regional governments, and indirectly to local militias when corrupt officials resell them on the black market. It’s a lucrative, secretive, and paranoid industry fueling wars and creating one refugee crisis after another. Cate finds herself stonewalled at every turn as she tries to reconstruct Eric’s last days and hours alive. She’s also puzzled by strange postcards picturing Jamaican beaches with cryptic messages that her brother sent to her and their estranged father only days before his death.
She’s helped by Omar, a young gay Egyptian. He locates the source of the Jamaican postcards, which leads her to a secret love nest her brother had rented to escape Polestar’s ubiquitous surveillance of its employees. Omar is Bollen’s vehicle for portraying life as a gay man in a dangerously repressive Muslim society. Many of Bollen’s books have gay characters who are the heroes, or, in the case of A Beautiful Crime, two lovers who become sympathetic grifters. Only in The Destroyers is the relationship between the principal male characters sexually ambiguous, which adds to the tension between them.
With the discovery of his love nest, Cate begins to doubt her brother’s integrity. To improve its public image, Polestar runs a center for refugees that offers language and job training classes, game rooms, and a computer lab. Eric was popular at the center. Did he take unfair advantage of his popularity? The refugees, of course, are desperately poor and vulnerable to all sorts of abuses. Did Eric exploit them sexually? Was that why he rented a secret love nest? Some troubling evidence suggests it was, raising the question: did he abuse somebody who ultimately killed him and made it look like a suicide?
The more Cate searches for an answer to that question, the more troubling—and perilous—becomes her own situation. She’s drawn into Polestar’s inner circle, learning more than it’s safe for her. Nevertheless, she acts on this newfound information, bringing the book to a jarring climax.
Bollen is a masterful writer. He didn’t invent literary suspense, but he’s one of the best at it. When Cate’s running from danger, you, the reader, are panting alongside her. His stories are intricate and tightly woven, yet the reader never gets lost. He frequently uses similes that always manage to convey the perfect image. There’s nothing extemporaneous in his novels. Everything — every object or person — is eventually used in the story. No cheap shots. Only brilliance.
His books are all stand-alone. I can’t wait to be transported someplace new by the next one.
