I would hesitate to call this book a thriller, though it appears, from the surface that one could. James Axton, risk analyst, expatriate American living in Greece, is fascinated with a cult that appears to be murdering people, choosing them by the intials of their names. The book is complicated, more so because the plot evolves in the background of intense character development.

I found it difficult to read, at times bordering on tedious, but nevertheless, I'm impressed because it is not easy to sustain so many characters and keep them all interesting. The crew of American and British expatriates that Axton hangs out with, the archaeologist, Owen, that his estranged wife works with, and most of all, Axton's son, Tap, who is six years old but is writing a novel that is based on Owen's life. It's fascinating, because Delillo ends the book with an excerpt from Tap's novel, and he confesses in an interview in the New York Times that he based Tap on Atticus Lish, the young son of a friend of his. Parts of Tap's novel are borrowed from Atticus' own book, leading Delillo to confess, wryly, "In other words, I stole from a kid".

Despite Delillo's immense oeuvre, this the first book by him that I'm reading. It's interesting because is politically plotty, but simultaneously a rather fine study of human relationships and families - Axton and his estranged wife, Axton and his son, Owen's solitude, parents, children, lovers, marriages. Underneath it all, Delillo's narration seems to convey a sense of the real solitude of human beings, the internal lives that play out in our heads. In other words, not a book to read alone at 3 a.m., but a book to read, nonetheless.