Christopher Bollen

Up to par with previous books from Bollen although I did wonder at Cate's inability to let it go in the face of such stacked odds and danger. Sure, she reminisced about growing up with Eric and his teaching her how to ride a bike and stuff, but is that really enough to send her headlong into corporate cover ups and the massively unstable modern Egyptian society? That nagged at me quite a bit all during the book. Could be that my own distant relationship with my brother is at the root of it, but it still rang a bit false. The ending is surprising and although the killer's identity wasn't part of that, other things were.

The power and control of a private US military company comes across well here with a lot of menacing manipulation and sneakiness. The fact that Cate so blithely heads out to Egypt and thinks that she is being sneaky, is pretty funny. Of course they know exactly where she is and what she's doing. It's also obvious that Matthias is not what he seems, although the abstract painter line is a hoot. Just because I've read a million thrillers, I suspected everyone, even the innocuous and slightly fatuous Roe so his guilt wasn't hard to believe, although Cate's death in that quick, sudden way surprised me a lot. As did Wes's culpability and lies even though he was painted as pretty dubious right from the start. I thought that was just stepchild bias. Not sure why the plotline about the hated father was in the story as it really didn't go anywhere and just served an easy out for bringing the settlement claim on Polestar - to make the family look less mercenary, I guess. The ending is a downer in a way, but I'm really glad that Omar came out ok in the end. Very scary that bit with the Egyptian police.… (more)

I skimmed the second half of this, because I really wanted to find out what had happened to Eric, but I wasn't finding the narrative gripping enough somehow. Eric is employed by Polestar, an American arms manufacturer, to go around the world fixing weapons they have sold to other countries (here to Egypt), and is found dead, apparently having fallen from his hotel balcony. His sister Cate (who wasn't a terribly likeable character) refuses to believe Eric committed suicide, but this narrative is the preferred one for Polestar, the Egyptian authorities and the US embassy in Cairo.

So Cate goes to Cairo and gets to the bottom of things. She is partly helped by some mysterious postcards Eric sent just before his death - email, texts, phone calls and letters with return addresses (?!) all being monitored by the aforementioned baddies. These postcards were so oblique in their import as to be an entire waste of time, but Cate eventually interprets them. The very ending was a bit off the wall/out of left field. I mainly felt sorry for Farida.… (more)

The Lost Americans is a thrilling murder mystery set in Egypt, amid the current volatile conditions to be found there. Eric Castle is a weapons technician working for a billion dollar weapons company on overseas jobs in the most dangerous locations on the planet. The story opens with a distressed Eric fearing that he had crossed the line with his company and believing that his life may even be in danger. He sends off two cryptic messages to his family back in the U.S. in the mail shortly before his body is found below his third floor hotel balcony.

Cate Castle, Eric's sister, receives the call from her stepfather, Wes, informing her of her brother's death, which the Egyptian authorities have labeled a suicide. Though Cate had lost contact with her brother, she refused to accept that verdict. Then she received the mysterious message Eric had sent her on a postcard. From that point, finding Eric's killer became her only mission. To that end, she traveled to Egypt and unleashed a hornet's nest with non-stop, hair-raising action from the moment she stepped foot on Egyptian soil. Everyone has a stake in Eric's death--Polestar, the company he worked for; the Egyptian government, the U.S. government, they all had reasons to possibly want Eric, and the secrets he had uncovered, to disappear. The complex web of lies, deceit and secrets grows page by page, as does the list of people who may be complicit in the cover up of Eric's murder and perhaps even in the murder itself.

I found this book hard to put down at night and couldn't wait to pick it back up again in the morning. The plot is excellent and the writing very good. The twists and turns are absolutely riveting and keep you on the edge of your seat throughout the entirety of the book. Things are not always, or maybe ever, what they seem. I was sorry to have finally finished the last page and come to the surprising conclusion of the story.… (more)