The Red Lotus - Chris Bohjalian (Copy)

Genre: Thrillers & Suspense

Chris Bohjalian published The Red Lotus at the very beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic. After reading this book, you have to question whether or not he had an inside track! I’m glad that I read it at the end of the pandemic. (I hope it’s the end. Don’t want to jinx it - as Bohjalian writes about one of the characters at the end of the book.)

Alexis - an ER doctor - and her boyfriend go off to Vietnam on a bike tour. At the beginning of the book she is waiting in the hotel for him to return from a solo ride taken ostensibly to visit sites that were important to his family. But he never comes back. It was a dangerous road. And he probably shouldn’t have been biking alone. But the story is much more sinister than a simple bike accident.

As Alexis begins to learn more about this man, his lies unravel. Her need to know parallels her emergency room character. She could have just left it alone, but she feels the need to hire a private investigator, to contact police sources in Vietnam, and not trust anyone.

The most positive characters in the story are in Vietnam. There is an overlay of the horrible things that Westerners have inflicted on the Vietnamese people.

I had a problem with her insertion into the mysteries of his character because he told her that his father was wounded in battle. And he wasn’t. Would that really have been enough to catapult someone into a cascade of events that resulted in a great deal of death and dying?

And there was a long filler piece about the private eye’s experience in Vietnam during the war that didn’t move the story forward.

On the other hand Bohjalian’s writing is excellent and worth reading. The story is carefully researched and technically well supported. It is a thriller tale that comes way too close to paralleling reality.

Don’t ignore the Epilogue.