Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“The boy is the aggravator. He’s the allergen that’s poisoning the house. No more half steps. He must be gotten rid of.”

WOW 😲 This was incredible!! What a perfect choice for my first book of 2025. It completely took over my brain. I was even thinking about it while trying to get to sleep at night! It’s been described as a lot of things, but to me it felt like a psychological suspense with some thriller and horror elements thrown in. And it just works. I loved it! Can all books I read this year be this good, please?! I’m so thrilled to be sharing my review for HAVOC!

About the book

Eighty-one-year-old Maggie Burkhardt has left it all behind and 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 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?

The beginning

I was pulled straight into this book from the very first page and it didn’t let me go until the end. Oh my GOD. Told from the perspective of eighty-one-year-old Maggie Burkhardt, there was just something about it that felt refreshing and intriguing in equal measure. After losing her husband Peter six years ago, Maggie is spending her remaining years living at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor, Egypt. I loved getting to know her and the comings and goings of the hotel, and despite her nosy, interfering nature, I really loved her character. She loves to observe guests at the hotel, to spy on them. She loves finding out everything she can about them and attempts to save them from what she sees as unhappy relationships. The author really sets a scene filled with curiosity, and I was always unsure what we’d learn about Maggie next. And it was clear there was so much to learn. The book is set in a Covid world, with the hotel desperate for bookings thanks to the pandemic affecting tourism. Thankfully, two more interesting people walk through the hotel doors…

“I change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not. Only once did my actions end for the worse. But I don’t like to think about the murder.”

Tess and her son, Otto, are Maggie’s new target. Maggie tries to find out everything she can, to build their story in her mind. What brought them to the hotel? Where was Otto’s father? What was their story? Maggie befriends them, and for a moment, she likes the ‘family’ feel it gives her. A sense of belonging. Tess kind of reminded Maggie of her own daughter, who she sadly lost. It soon becomes clear that Otto wasn’t your average eight-year-old. I absolutely loved him. Such an amazing character, one that perfectly contrasted Maggie in age, but a boy who was similar in mind. He’s clever. He picks up on things you wouldn’t expect. He keeps an eye on Maggie at first, seemingly curious about her. He notices things other boys probably wouldn’t give a second thought about. It seemed, at first, that Maggie and Otto had an unspoken understanding of each other. A bond very quickly created. But what came next truly delighted me and I knew things would start to get darker. This boy was different. It seemed Maggie had met her match. The tone of the book changed and I was truly hooked. Game on.

The middle

I loved the sudden change in Otto. The beautiful bond Maggie wanted to create with him, with this family, was off the cards. It seemed Otto could see right through her. He notices when she emerges from another guest’s room. He knows the reason an upset guest left the hotel was due to Maggie’s interference, and he threatens to tell someone about what she’d done. It was weird; I felt a strange fear of this eight-year-old boy. He begins to make demands, requesting things, blackmailing Maggie to ensure he kept her secret. When she refuses one day, he takes the most precious thing she owns, and destroys it. I loved the unexpected, the author’s ability to instil fear and anger inside me felt so impressive. What ensued was a huge game of one-upping each other to even the score. Maggie wasn’t a push over. Every time he strikes, she has a plan to get her revenge. I loved thinking about how far this would go, how far Otto would push Maggie and how hard she’d push back. It was scary thinking about the possibilities, but this made the book so addictive for me. I was obsessed with it. The unpredictability was glorious!

“I work with the circumstances given to me. I don’t make fate. I only twist it.”

Aside from a storyline getting deeper and darker with each passing chapter, I just have to mention the author’s perfect atmosphere building. Bollen’s words completely capture your full attention, and the description of pretty much everything was truly brilliant. We explore relationships in so many forms, the positive and the negative, the character development so full and multifaceted at times. I could really see all of these characters so clearly. As a darker, more intense history of Otto is revealed, I did feel some sadness, some sympathy – he was a young boy after all. But the danger he is to those around him had me constantly on edge. How on earth could Maggie stop him? How could she find a way for him to leave, and to leave her alone in her home, her safe haven once more? As soon as this boy digs deeper into her life, her past, as soon as he exploits her loss and heartache, that’s when she realises she needs him gone. Right now. By any means necessary. She needs an accomplice. But after her plan backfires, she has more than Otto to deal with. The stress I felt at this point was overwhelming, but overwhelmingly brilliant. I could not predict where things would go from here!

The end

The book became so thick with tension and unease. It was pure brilliance. More of Maggie’s past is revealed to us and I loved how deep, how dark, how horrific it was. Out of all the many, many people she’d helped in the past, there were two people she couldn’t save. Her story explained her reasoning for moving to the Royal Karnak, She’d experienced so much, but this time, things had gotten way out of hand. There were so many obstacles in Maggie’s way to getting what she needs, and even though these were frustrating, she deals with them. She always has a plan. She always finds a way. And she could find a way out of her current mess too, couldn’t she? As things spiral out of control, the faster and faster I read. Each chapter just added more and more pressure, the cliff hangers were beautifully written and each had me racing to start the next chapter. This is how I need a book to make me feel! The portrayal of Maggie’s emotions were so strong that I often felt them too. Guilt. Fear. Panic. Just so damn good.

“Then I spot the boy. Not twenty feet away, crouched in a different patch of bushes. Otto amid the leaves, hiding, waiting, watching, laughing.”

Everything escalated even further as the final chapters came to a close and I did wonder whether anything would stop Otto. I wasn’t even sure Maggie could hide from her past for much longer. It’s creepy. It’s unnerving. It’s WILD. But it also has a contrasting poignancy, a sadness, something that made my heart ache a little. It was written so well I can’t even tell you. The past and present began to merge in a brilliant kaleidoscope of feelings and memories. And then, the most magnificent twist. I couldn’t quite believe it! The ending, even though loosely rounded up, was such a thought-provoking one. I sat in silence for a while after finishing that last page, just thinking. Even though there were many loose ends that weren’t tied up, I thought the impact it had was more than worth it, and I’m not usually a fan of endings like this! It was haunting. Chaotic. I questioned so much about Maggie’s reliability as a narrator. My god, so flawlessly put together. A masterpiece that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend!

Overall thoughts

HAVOC is an intense, atmospheric novel about an eighty-one-year-old woman who meets her match in the form of an eight-year-old boy. It’s disturbing, suspenseful and completely unpredictable. It’s an uncontrollable game of cat and mouse, where revenge slowly gets more horrific until it spirals into something nightmarish. It’s written with a deft touch, the plot so suspenseful and characters so perfectly developed and memorable. But it’s contrasted with such beautiful, full descriptions of Luxor, Egypt and the wonderful luxury hotel where Maggie Burkhardt spends her days. It’s gloriously chaotic with an ending that felt so haunting and thought-provoking. I just know this book will be in my head all year! Utterly brilliant.

A HUGE thank you to the author, Christopher Bollen, and the amazing team at HarperFictionPR for my gifted copy! You can grab your own copy of HAVOC over on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Make sure you’re following the author on Instagram for more updates!

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