AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile
Graham Halstead’s narration of Bollen’s novel is quite an accomplishment. As the main character, Ian Bledsoe, Halstead embodies the voice of a man down on his luck and looking for opportunities. His old friend, Charlie, lives in Greece and appears to embody the life Ian thinks he wants: He’s wealthy and surrounded by interesting people. Ian also struggles with the ethical dilemmas of his wealthy father’s business, which exploits local people. Intrigue mounts when Ian’s father dies and Charlie disappears under mysterious circumstances. As this thoroughly engrossing audiobook transports listeners to Greece, Halstead handles the expanding cast of international characters subtly and effectively. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
04/17/2017
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. (June)
London Guardian
If you like your thrillers sexy, smart and elegant, don’t miss Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers. It manages to be both fast-paced and contemplative, an excellent entertainment and also something more lasting, a haunting meditation on friendship and desperation.
Liz Smith
I tore through Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers.... Bollen writes so extraordinarily well, conjures up such striking imagery, smart dialogue and even a few jolting surprises. I loved it, and pondered the future of each character — those who survived, at any rate.
Sophie McManus
Possessed of both The Talented Mr.Ripley’s cold-blooded electricity and a beguiling elegance, The Destroyers enfolds. A propulsive, hypnotic portrait of rot at paradise’s heart and of the sprawling, inescapable tendrils of class and avarice.
Garth Greenwell
With the swiftness of a thriller and the density of art, Christopher Bollen’s new novel explores the sting of disgrace and the dangerous lure of redemption. Equal parts Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Destroyers is at once lyrical and suspenseful, thoughtful and riveting.
Booklist
Intoxicating.
Alan Furst
The Destroyers is one superb novel, a tightly woven and fast-moving narrative set in beautifully crafted prose. A read-all-night of a book.
Jay McInerney
The Destroyers is a smart, sophisticated literary thriller; for all its originality, it invokes the shades of Lawrence Durrell and Graham Greene.
429
A perfect summer read.... Louche, suspenseful, and polysexual.
BookPage
Engrossing.... Bollen takes his time unraveling the seeds of deceit, obsession and secrets, building suspense with each page.
New York Post
Patricia Highsmith meets F. Scott Fitzgerald
OUT
Christopher Bollen... follows up his gripping thriller Orient with The Destroyers, an elegant and twisting suspense novel that is earning comparisons to the genre’s great lesbian doyenne, Patricia Highsmith.
Departures
A pitch-perfect literary thriller, Bollen’s third novel has drawn comparisons to Patricia Highsmith and Donna Tartt.
PopSugar
A sophisticated, sexy thriller.
Village Voice
A perfect summer read in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith.... A character-driven mystery where the writing is frequently as luxurious as its setting.
Yahoo! Style
A very sophisticated, stylish journey…. The ideal beach read... Bollen’s writing is sharp, and the story is exciting and keeps you guessing as to what game is being played and who is masterminding it all.
Paste
Christopher Bollen’s literary thriller is an exemplar of the form—one of those rare novels that not only embraces all the conventions of its genre but elevates them.
Refinery29
The perfect literary thriller set under the Grecian sun.
BBC.com
Intellectually intriguing and eerily timely.
T Magazine
A particularly transporting beach read.”
Maya Singer
Christopher Bollen’s third novel, The Destroyers, was pretty much custom-built for beach reading—lies! Murder! Rich people vacationing on a Greek Island!... He’s a longtime fan of Agatha Christie, which shows in his terrific mystery plotting, but he’s also a beautiful writer of prose and a canny psychologist of his characters.... The ideal summer page-turner.
New York Times Book Review
A seductive and richly atmospheric literary thriller with a sleek Patricia Highsmith surface.
Entertainment Weekly
[A] stylish literary study of the games moneyed people play.
Esquire
In this Talented Mr. Ripley-esque thriller, you’ll get transported to the remote and dazzling Greek island of Patmos where Europe’s glitzy jet set cavort all summer long.
People
A delicious literary thriller.
New York Times
Beautiful people visiting glamorous places, being wicked enough to bring Patricia Highsmith to mind. It just isn’t summer without this kind of globe-trotting glamour to read about, especially when most of it is set in the Aegean. Bollen is stylish enough to know what sells.... Escapism, as calculating as it gets.”
Angela Ledgerwood
In this Talented Mr. Ripley-esque thriller, you’ll get transported to the remote and dazzling Greek island of Patmos where Europe’s glitzy jet set cavort all summer long.
Art Taylor
“[Bollen] reveals a graceful prose style in his literary thriller The Destroyers. Sharp imagery and incisive descriptions bring to life both the Greek island of Patmos and the moneyed class laying claim to it.... The suspense here is less high-speed chases or chapter-ending cliffhangers than something out of Patricia Highsmith—hardly a complaint.
Moira Macdonald
Just try keeping The Talented Mr. Ripley — that shimmering 1999 movie, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, of rich Americans getting into picturesque trouble in the sunny Mediterranean — out of your head while reading this dark-side-of-summer novel.... I rapidly turned the pages, lost in the harsh sunlight of Bollen’s world.
Janet Maslin
Beautiful people visiting glamorous places, being wicked enough to bring Patricia Highsmith to mind. It just isn’t summer without this kind of globe-trotting glamour to read about, especially when most of it is set in the Aegean. Bollen is stylish enough to know what sells.... Escapism, as calculating as it gets.”
on Orient People
This is beach reading that’s as intelligent as it is absorbing.
USA Today
A gorgeously written book whose literary chops are beyond doubt. Come for the prose, and stay for the murders.
Library Journal
04/01/2017
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
AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile
Graham Halstead’s narration of Bollen’s novel is quite an accomplishment. As the main character, Ian Bledsoe, Halstead embodies the voice of a man down on his luck and looking for opportunities. His old friend, Charlie, lives in Greece and appears to embody the life Ian thinks he wants: He’s wealthy and surrounded by interesting people. Ian also struggles with the ethical dilemmas of his wealthy father’s business, which exploits local people. Intrigue mounts when Ian’s father dies and Charlie disappears under mysterious circumstances. As this thoroughly engrossing audiobook transports listeners to Greece, Halstead handles the expanding cast of international characters subtly and effectively. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-03-21
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 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"), 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.
