Three stars for this dark story….though I do love bad children. Give me a kid who kills and I’m a happy reader.

Maggie Burkhardt is eighty-one, a widow and she’s come to the Royal Karnak Hotel on the banks of the Nile to escape a sticky situation at her last hotel.

One morning she notices a sad looking woman named Tess and her eight year old son Otto at check in. Maggie invites them into her life. Big, big mistake. Because in Otto Maggie may have met her malevolent match.

Interesting little tale. The ending was a bit odd and I don’t know that I loved it. Worth an afternoon.

This book stands apart from the rest of these books as a page-turning psychological suspense novel–but wow is it good. This is a dark, disturbing, “what did I just read” kind of book that brilliantly flips the lovable curmudgeon trope around with a jolt and a shock. The novel follows Maggie, an octogenarian posted up at a decaying old-world luxury hotel in Egypt after abandoning a similar setup in Switzerland for unknown reasons. She is a meddler, but only because she believes everyone deserves the type of love and happiness she had with her late husband. When a single mother and her eight-year-old son arrive at the hotel, Maggie can’t help but get involved and he just may turn out to be a kindred spirit or worthy foe. Please do not let this premise fool you and hear me when I tell you that Havoc is unsettling and deranged, but also unputdownable.

Maggie Burkhardt finds solace amid the pandemic at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Egypt. She spends her days reminiscing about her deceased husband and her daughter that also died much too young leaving Maggie alone in the world. Since their passing she has traveled throughout Europe. Before making her way to Egypt she was in Sweden where a tragedy sent her fleeing in the night to her new found safe place.

Once she's settled in this meddlesome octogenarian has finally met her match with the arrival of new guests, Tessa, and her 8 year old son, Otto.

Otto, with his mismatched eyes, seems to see who Maggie really is which will set these two down a path of destruction.

This book definitely had it's ups and downs. There were parts that really drew my interest and other parts that I skimmed in boredom. Maggie was quite the character and she will have you cringing throughout the entire book. The latter half of the book does ramp up in both suspense and darkness and the ending was delightfully twisted which made this a worthwhile reading experience for me. 4 stars!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper for my complimentary copy.

Intensely clever, full of twists and turns I literally never saw coming. I listened to half of this on audio and read the second half (both copies provided by Netgalley and the publisher, thank you by the way!). The narration is BRILLIANT. I am actually going to go back and listen to the ending so that I can hear the narrator get to the climax of the book. So many questions left unanswered, but so satisfying. A+ and extra points for making me think there was an error in the narrative when really it was part of the twist.

Eighty-something year old Maggie returns to the Hotel Karnak on the banks of the Nile to live out the rest of her life, but meets an unlikely eight-year-old Otto who gets in the way of her lifestyle. Maggie is a self-made love arbitrator who decides on the sly to interfere in couples' lives and engineer their break up when she thinks one of the women in the marriage is or will be unhappy.

Otto has witnessed her leaving false trails that led to the break up of a family in the hotel and he decides to play cat and mouse with Maggie throughout the book. He is diabolical in getting back at Maggie when she doesn't give in to his blackmail for video games and items for his mother.

A dark tale of warring minds, both of which get ever more desperate, until they both seem to go off track. It was hard to believe that an eight year old could be so diabolical, but then this is fiction and Maggie is equally wicked. The last page of the book left me wondering if Otto intended such an ending. The Egyption god of disorder, violence, and foreigners in Egypt, Set, who is mentioned in the book, seems to reign over these two opponents.

It was an engrossing read, leaving the reader wondering throughout, what craziness will be the next thing to happen?

What in the ever-loving fudge did I just read?!? I mean, the blurb told me exactly what this book was going to be about so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I absolutely did not expect it to be so dark. If you're going into this one planning to read about a benignly meddlesome old woman and a mischievous young boy playing harmless pranks on each other, well … it's certainly not that. Which I guess is a good thing, because that sounds like a boring read now that I think about it. Havoc is a lot of things, but boring is not one of them.

Our narrator is Maggie, a nosy octogenarian who has taken it upon herself to “fix” other people's lives, even if they haven't exactly asked for her help. She's already fled one hotel in Europe due to her meddling taking an unexpected turn. She's unlikeable and unreliable and should probably be some sort of retirement home with locks on the outside of the doors. What will happen when Maggie pits herself against someone who's just as awful as she is? And what if that person just happens to be an eight-year-old boy?

It's probably best if you go into this book mostly blind, but I will reiterate that this is a dark (and insane) read. It starts off fairly tame and then goes completely off the rails. You can feel the tension build as you turn the pages. And then the ending is kind of insane but also kind of brilliant and I am not exactly sure how I should feel about any of it.

My overall rating: 4.45 stars, rounded down. If you like twisted and suspenseful tales narrated by awful old women with a whole host of personality disorders, definitely consider giving this one a read. It's a wild ride.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Harper for providing me with an advance copy of this book to review. Its expected publication date is December 3, 2024.