Eighty-one-year-old Maggie Burkhardt has left it all behind. After the death of her husband and the tragic loss of her daughter Julia, she fled her native Wisconsin and has spent the last five years ping-ponging between the world’s luxury hotels. Now she has finally come to rest somewhere she can imagine staying forever: the Royal Karnak Hotel in Luxor, Egypt. Maggie is no sweet old lady. She has a nasty, nosy little habit: she spies on her fellow guests and manipulates situations to ‘liberate’ them from what she sees as unhappy relationships. When an enigmatic eight-year-old boy, Otto, and his well-meaning mother arrive at the hotel, Maggie sees two easy targets. But she is more wrong than she could possibly know, and is soon locked in a death-spiral with Otto – has she finally met her match in a child one-tenth her age? Crackling with the perceptive acid wit of The White Lotus and haloed by Shirley Jackson’s cruel, dark magic, Christopher Bollen’s new novel is a decadent and ghastly delight.
