Havoc by Christopher Bollen (Borough, £16.99)
The narrator of American author Bollen’s latest novel, 81-year-old Wisconsin widow Maggie Burkhardt, has an insatiable desire to meddle in other people’s lives. Her methods, which include spreading rumours and planting false evidence of adultery, are designed to “change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not”. Sequestered in European hotels since the death of her husband six years earlier, the start of lockdown finds her a resident of the once-grand Royal Karnak Palace in Luxor, Egypt. It’s clear from the off that her attempts to “liberate” people haven’t always ended well – “I don’t like to talk about the murder” – but Maggie, whose inconsistent account of her past soon has us starting to doubt her reliability, just can’t help herself. When a weedy, bespectacled and sly eight-year-old boy comes to stay at the hotel with his mother, Maggie meets her match. Young Otto realises what she’s up to and starts blackmailing her; carnage ensues as the pair end up locked in a death-spiral. Beautiful writing and expertly torqued tension add up to a delightfully nasty page-turner.
Strange Pictures by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion (Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99)
YouTuber Uketsu, a mysterious masked figure whose identity is unknown, is a bestseller in his native Japan. His debut novel, illustrated with the titular black-and-white drawings, contains both visual and narrative mysteries-within-a-mystery. A psychology professor attempts to deconstruct the artwork of an 11-year-old killer; a student becomes curious about an abandoned blog containing a pregnant woman’s eerily prescient drawings; a threatening stranger stalks a mother whose six-year-old son has crayoned a disturbing picture of their block of flats; the final landscape sketch of a murder victim found on a mountain gives a clue to who killed him – and all these stories are ingeniously linked. The picture puzzles are intriguing, and sharp-eyed readers/viewers may sometimes find themselves figuring things out slightly ahead of the protagonists, but there’s a surprisingly satisfactory emotional resonance to this macabre, unsettling box of tricks.
