Book Review: high society thriller 'The Destroyers' is a page-turner

Christopher Bollen is editor-at-large for Interview magazine and knows about disaffected, wealthy New Yorkers, as evidenced by his first two novels Lightning People and Orient.

In his latest outing, The Destroyers, he moves the action to the Greek island of Patmos, where Ian Bedsloe has washed up after the death of his estranged father, a wealthy manufacturer of baby food.

Disinherited and depressed, he steals some money from his father's account and skips town before the funeral, heading for the shelter of Charlie, Charalambos Konstantinou, his old friend from their days at an elite school in New York.

Charlie is the younger - and way richer - son of a Greek industrialist who has retreated to the fabled island to run a yacht- chartering company. He welcomes Ian like a brother and draws him into his circle of gilded allsorts: his lover Sonny, a former Hollywood star; Adrian, the gorgeous gay son of a crooked Polish billionaire and the lover of Charlie's cousin Rassym, and Miles, a louche, bibulous Brit aristocrat. And then there's Louise, Ian's ex from college, who he might just still be in love with.

At first all is golden. All is calm. Marinated in vodka, the group shifts from yacht to taverna to balcony, soaked in ennui. Ian begins to breathe, thinking he has outrun his past, when he was wrongly accused of malfeasance.

Charlie offers him a job as his 2IC; Louise and he are excavating their college passion; New York is fading.

But then the benign island starts to warp into a baneful place of deceit and violence. There's the bomb at Charlie's favourite taverna, which went off when he was due to be there. There are the deranged hippies on the beach, two of whom die in a motorcycle accident.

The monks in the monastery are showing less-than-Christian business principles - think threats of dismemberment - an Austrian businessman is menacing Charlie for a cut in his business and the local people are wringing their hands that Charlie's father is on his deathbed. What will happen to them?

So when Charlie - exuberant, in-charge Charlie - vanishes one night, Ian is caught up in a slipstream of lies and denial. His step-siblings in New York are after him for the money he stole. And he, as Charlie's henchman, now has to deal with the fallout of his disappearance.

Who is telling the truth?

Destroyers - named after a game Ian and Charlie played as boys when they would imagine how to get out of impossible situations - has become real.

It's a page-turner, certainly, even if you scorn the idiocy of the allsorts: "It's still too hot for Kraków 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."

Bollen strains hard for the title of "literary thriller" by over-egging the similes and sequences of superfluous description that pad out his narrative: "The bruises on his knuckles have faded to the colour of sunlight on the snow."

Still, one is compelled to find out what has happened to Charlie and whether he will return, and is there any redemption for poor Ian? Is he an unreliable narrator or just a good man trying to survive?

• 'The Destroyers' by Christopher Bollen is published by Scribner/Jonathan Ball Publishers; it's available from Takealot.

• This article was originally published in The Times.