Review
Author: Lawrence Osborne
Reviewed by: Robert Bunzel
Issue: September 2017
Reviewers compare Osborne to Graham Greene, but I think Greene had more comedy in him while Osborne in this book grabs you and thrills as rich people behave badly. The book's action is largely on the Greek island of Hydra where affluent families flock in summer. The protagonist is Naomi Codrington, 24, just fired from her London law firm for misconduct in a pro bono case. She is a rich do-gooder with no moral compass who despises her stepmother and barely tolerates her industrialist father who has houses in London, Serrano, Italy, and Hydra. Naomi befriends 19-year old Samantha vacationing on the island with her parents from New York. The young beautiful women take an interest in a migrant Syrian named Fouad found on a deserted Hydra beach, and Naomi decides that his future will be changed if he burgles her family house in Hydra and makes off with her father's cash, valuables, and a car. Naomi involves Samantha and the family maid Carissa in this plot, but her father Jimmy awakens during the heist and murder and blackmail ensue. The balance of the story involves whether Naomi and Samantha will be exposed. At the center of the story is Naomi, determined in chilling fashion after her indirect patricide to repaint the family Hydra villa and remove all memories of her father and stepmother - despite where they are buried. Every conversation she has in the book with friends, relatives, waiters, and the like has a Hitchcock-like subtext of anxiety. When an old friend of her father, Rockhold, arrives on Hydra to investigate the Codringtons' disappearance, his interrogations of Naomi are fine-tuned psychology, recalling Matt Damon's pained falseness in playing the killer Ripley. Rockhold's later chase of Fouad through Italy is exhilarating as the net tightens on Fouad and the impact on Naomi broods. What if most everyone dies and the beautiful girls must live with that horror.