The Destroyers

When Charlie and I were young, we played a game called Destroyers . . . We were sharpening our instincts, jettisoning attachments. We were honing strategies for survival . . .

Ian Bledsoe is on the run, broke and humiliated, fleeing the emotional and financial fall-out of his father's death. His childhood friend Charlie – rich, exuberant and basking in life on the Greek island of Patmos – is his last hope.

At first, Patmos is like a dream – sun-soaked days on Charlie’s yacht and the reappearance of a girlfriend from Ian’s past – and Charlie readily offers the lifeline he desperately needs. But, like Charlie himself, this beautiful island conceals a darkness beneath. When he vanishes leaving Ian to handle his murky business affairs, Ian finds himself caught in a terrifying labyrinth of deceptions. As boys, the pair played a game called Destroyers – a game, he now realizes, they may never have stopped playing. Expansive, vivid and suspenseful, The Destroyers is a mesmerizing drama of identity, power and fate, fathers and sons, self-invention and self-deception.

ADVANCE PRAISE

"The Destroyers is a smart, sophisticated literary thriller; for all its originality, it invokes the shades of Lawrence Durrell and Graham Greene." —JAY MCINERNEY

"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." — GARTH GREENWELL, AUTHOR OF WHAT BELONGS TO YOU

"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." —SOPHIE MCMANUS, AUTHOR OF THE UNFORTUNATES