The Destroyers

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.