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.
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.
