Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 4

The HOUR OF THE WITCH tolls on May 4

"Conjuring up specters of #MeToo recriminations and social media shaming, there are twenty-first-century parallels to Bohjalian’s atmospheric Puritan milieu, and his trademark extensive research pays off in this authentic portrait of courage in the face of society’s worst impulses…This witch hunt drama has a special magnetism.”
—Carol Haggas, Booklist, starred review

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

Hoping all is well — or as well as it can be in a pandemic — with you and your family. It feels like we've turned a corner.

Here are three facts about the Puritans you might not have known:

They drank a LOT of beer;

Divorce was legal and roughly 30 couples divorced in Boston between 1630 and 1692;

They did not use forks because the three-tined utensil starting to gain favor in Europe was viewed as “the Devil’s Tines.”


All of this figures prominently in my next novel.

The HOUR OF THE WITCH tolls on May 4. It’s a novel of historical suspense set in 1662 Boston and inspired by the first divorce in North America for domestic violence — and, yes, it’s a novel about one of the first real witch hunts in New England, a moment in time when Satan was as real as your neighbor. It's the nexus of adultery, divorce, and. . .witchcraft. For a tale set in 1662, it is unexpectedly timely.

Most, if not all, of the book tour will be virtual. We’re all a little tired of that. So, to make this more fun, every event will be a conversation between me and some of your favorite authors. Among them?

Cristina Alger
Jenna Blum
Patti Callahan
Alice Hoffman
Wally Lamb
Jennifer McMahon
Sheila O’Connor
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Gin Phillips
Jodi Picoult
Lisa Scottoline
Amor Towles
Adriana Trigiani

Stay tuned for details.

Want to preorder HOUR OF THE WITCH? So easy. Call or visit your local bookstore or click any of the links right here on Goodreads.

Thanks so much for your faith in my work. Fingers crossed I never disappoint you.

All the best,

Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter, Goodreads

On April 20, 2021, the HOUR OF THE WITCH will toll

"In 1660s Boston, blue-eyed, porcelain-delicate Mary Deerfield is determined to escape her marriage after her husband, the cruel and controlling Thomas Deerfield, shoves a fork through her hand in a drunken rage. Yet unfortunate incidents—a screaming maid, a boy’s death after Mary treats him with herbs—leaves her longing not just for freedom but for her life; she could be condemned to the gallows as a witch. Another surprise read from the fabulously protean, New York Times best-selling Bohjalian.”
— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

“Fabulously protean.” I like that. My goal as a novelist is never to write the same book twice.

What's next? HOUR OF THE WITCH.

The novel was inspired in part by a three-line reference from 1662 in the records of Boston's Court of Assistants about a Puritan woman who sued her husband for divorce for cruelty: what today we call domestic abuse.

Arguably, however, the novel has been gestating my whole life. A lot of books – at least the ones we write that we’re most proud of – simmer in the subconscious for decades, and I’ve always been fascinated by the Puritan mind.

And while I view the novel as historical fiction, I know also it's an historical thriller. As soon as my heroine, Mary Deerfield, initiated her divorce, I understood quickly that a civil case, divorce, would devolve quickly into a criminal one: witchcraft. A seventeenth-century woman brave enough to stand alone against a bench of men in black robes? It was inevitable.

As my wife said when she read the first draft of the novel, “Wow. One of America's original witch hunts.” I rather like that, too — at least as much as “fabulously protean.”

The HOUR OF THE WITCH will toll on April 20, 2021, but it is not too early to preorder your copy wherever you buy books.

Yes, the novel is set in 1662 — but I know in my heart I have never written a novel more timely. I can’t wait to hear what you all think.

Stay safe; stay sane; read books. As always, thank you for your faith in my work.

All the best,

Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter, Goodreads

PS: Don't forget to save a little room after your Thanksgiving dinner to watch the HBO Max adaptation of my novel, The Flight Attendant: It starts streaming November 26th. Kaley Cuoco is brilliant as my beleaguered flight attendant, and she is joined by an all-star cast that includes Zosia Mamet, Michiel Huisman, Rosie Perez, Merle Dandridge, and so many others. Here’s the trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP_WC...

Some people say that my wife's sister is a witch.

"Some people say that my wife’s sister is a witch."

So, begins Water Witches.

Greetings, my friends,

Water Witches is the earliest of my novels that I allow to remain in print. It was originally published in 1995 and it’s about — wait for it — global climate change. It’s a magical realist novel about a group of dowsers (or water witches), a cataclysmic Vermont drought, and a lobbyist so slick that his sister-in-law expects plates to slip through his hands. It is, in some ways, among the most autobiographic novels I’ve written.

And today, a brand new 25th Anniversary Edition paperback goes on sale. (I love the new cover.)

It is also available in a fantastic audio production, thanks to Kaleo Griffith and Kim Mai Guest, and you can listen to a preview clip right here:

https://soundcloud.com/penguin-audio/...

The new edition includes an essay I wrote about the novel’s origins and its eerie prescience. Sure, there were no smart phones or social networks in 1995, but even then we could see the ways the world — the literal climate and the ground on which we walk — was changing, and how we were the culprits. You can read all about it on my web site:

https://chrisbohjalian.com/water-witc...

Finally, it is one of my few novels with. . .jokes. Yes, a lot of my books are about heartbreak and dread. But Water Witches? Those emotions are leavened by my love for Vermont and my love for family: what it means to be a parent and a spouse.

Fingers crossed my work never disappoints you.

Stay safe; stay sane; wear masks.

And, as always, thank you.

All the best,

Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter

PS: Want a personalized copy of the novel? Visit the Vermont Bookshop and ask me to sign one in the Comments block when you check out:

https://www.vermontbookshop.com/book/...

Omaha was no walk on the beach

76 years ago today, DDay, the Allies returned to France. In 2009, I wrote about one American who was there, my neighbor Ron Hadley. Here's his story. I don't imagine those soldiers fought fascism, ever expecting to see its ugly head here.

********

by Chris Bohjalian

Sixty-five years ago today, Middlebury’s Ron Hadley was strolling down the streets of Weymouth, an English Channel port southwest of London, in his U.S. Navy’s ensign uniform.

Sixty-five years ago yesterday he was skippering a 50-foot long landing craft through the rough waves at Omaha Beach on Normandy, the water around him churned high by the vast armada of boats and — as he approached the beach — the wind riddled with the rapid fire blasts of German 88-millimeter guns firing anti-personnel shells. He was a right flank commander of his wave of landing craft during the D-Day invasion and the eventual liberation of Europe from Hitler’s Germany.

He would pilot his LCM (landing craft medium) from the troop ship to the beach twice, the first time about 6:30 in the morning and the second time close to noon. Initially, he was a part of the fifth wave of boats, but the signalman at the picket boat about 2,000 yards from shore told him to ignore the planned pace and get to the beach as quickly as possible because the G.I.s were getting slaughtered and they needed men on the beach now. And so that first time Ron reached the shore he was actually in the midst of the second and third waves.

“I had 36 combat engineers on board and when we let down the ramp the Germans had set up a cross fire across our bow. Those 36 men never made it more than a few yards from the boat. They never made it on to the beach,” he recalls. When he was back at the shore five hours later with another three dozen men, the invasion had a foothold: This time his soldiers made it to the sand. On a ridge in the distance he even saw a column of German soldiers who had surrendered. Nevertheless, among the longest hours of his life were when he was ferrying that second group of soldiers to the landing site, because he couldn’t help but wonder if he was bringing them all to a certain death.

I had known Ron nearly two decades before I learned what he had endured and accomplished on June 6, 1944. Like so many veterans he doesn’t talk about it much. When he’d lived in Lincoln, we served together as board members on a senior citizen housing project in town. He had also been one of the leaders of the effort to raise the money to build a new library in the village. He was, as far as I knew, a retired executive who had had a successful career with AT&T, a guy from northern California who at some point had discovered Vermont and the small village we both called home. When I thought of him, I thought mostly of the hours he volunteered on behalf of the community and his gravelly, good-natured laugh.

At the time, I had no idea that he had been a part of the invasion of Normandy. Or, months later, the invasion of southern France. And in 1945 the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. “But D-Day,” he recalls now, “was the most startling, the most dramatic, the most horrible — and the most memorable.”

As soon as he had graduated from San Jose State University in 1943, he would go east to the Columbia University Midshipman School. He would train there, then in Norfolk, Va., and finally at Loch Long in Scotland.

He still has the slender topographic map he used that morning 65 years ago: The elevation of the hills just beyond the beach, the church steeple that was one of his key landmarks. He has been back to the American cemetery on the bluff overlooking the beach. He’s 87 now, a part of that greatest generation, and he is more comfortable discussing those experiences today than he was 10 years ago:

“It took me a long, long time before I could talk about it. But people should know what took place — that people were giving up their lives for something that mattered. It’s important that people know about that moment in history.”

Indeed. And it’s important that we remember people like Ron.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 7, 2009. Chris's most recent novel, THE RED LOTUS, was published in March.)

The Short Stories I Found in the Sweater Box

When I was cleaning out my father’s home after he died, I came across a sweater box under his bed. In it were some of the short stories I had written in the third and fourth grade. For a few minutes I sat on the floor and read them, recalling the bedroom in Connecticut in which I had penned them decades earlier, my teachers, and the inspirations for the tales. A couple of times I had to blink back tears, because here was one more indication of how very much my parents had loved me: my mother had saved these stories for years, and then, after she died in 1995, my father had preserved them.

Now, it’s also possible that I was on the verge of crying because the stories were absolute train wrecks. Nowhere in them could I find what a creative writing professor might generously have called promise. (I must admit, I did take a little pride in my penmanship. My lettering would have made a medieval monk proud.)

But I was struck by how I could see, even in that “apprentice work”, two themes that would resonate in my novels as an adult: heartbreak and dread. When my books work – and heaven knows they do not always work – those are the points on the narrative compass that matter most. The stories ranged from a tale of a disembodied hand emerging from a wishing well to one about sibling rivalry on the school bus safety patrol. Another ended with this sentence: “The dripping stopped and the vultures had their meal.”

There’s often a deep connection for writers between what we read for pleasure and what we write. It’s not always direct: it’s not as if novelists known for writing horror only read horror. (On the other hand, one piece of advice I often give fledging writers is this: write the sort of thing you love to read most. If you love science fiction, write that. If you savor what we call literary fiction, let those books be your inspiration.)

But I know that Esther Forbes’s Revolutionary War saga, Johnny Tremaine, a novel about a 14-year-old apprentice silversmith with a crippling hand injury, influenced what I was writing in third grade. I still recall the last line with all of its metaphoric gravitas: “A man can stand up.”

Likewise, one week in fourth grade when I was home sick from school, I devoured Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a ghost story that to this day scares the hell out of me. I’m sure at nine years old I missed Eleanor Vance’s emotional instability and the sadness of her adulthood prior to joining the ghost hunters at Hill House, but I have never forgotten the riveting scene when she jumps from her bed in the night and cries out to her roommate, Theodora, “God! God! – Whose hand was I holding?”

Those two books for me were all about my dual lodestars of heartbreak and dread. To this day, that is what I seem to crave in my reading, whether all is right with the world or we are living in one of those moments in history that we will look back on and think to ourselves, “I know exactly where I was when. . .” I recall finishing Howard Frank Mosher’s A Stranger in the Kingdom on the front steps of my home in Vermont on a carefree Saturday afternoon in June, the sky cloudless and cerulean, savoring the wistfulness that washed over me and it made no sense given the kind of day it was. When I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to my daughter when she was in third grade, we were both a little unmoored by the quiver in my voice as I read the last page – and especially when it broke on that last paragraph:

“He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

We still have a totemic connection to books made of paper. I love audiobooks on my phone and on occasion I have even read novels on the device. But most books I read are hardcovers or paperbacks. My fiction is alphabetized by author, but I actually have a special section in my library for those books that left me feeling a little broken and a little fragile when I turned the last page – because those are my favorites. Those are the ones I have, on occasion, read two and three and even four times.

Sometimes I wonder what my parents thought when they perused those stories their son had written as a boy. Did they worry about the darkness in them? The sadness? I wasn’t a melancholic child. I’m not a morose adult. But then I remind myself that my mother was an avid — almost ferocious — reader; I still have her editions of some of her favorite novels. She probably saw in my short stories the books and movies that had triggered them. She very likely understood that, whether it’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Tales from the Crypt, children are often drawn to fiction that touches the darkest recesses of the soul.

And so mostly when I look at those handwritten stories, the blue ink on the white lined paper, I recall that among the great gifts my loving parents gave me was a love of reading in the first place.

++++++++

Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant, among many other books. His most recent bestselling novel, The Red Lotus, was published in March. This essay appeared originally in "We Found Time," on April 20, 2020.

My Top 5's: Inspirations and Places to Write and [Dead] Writers

Grateful to Daneet Steffens for her review of THE RED LOTUS in the Seattle Review of Books ("As always, Bohjalian creates a mesmerizing tale, a timely socio-political-business story with human frailties, illusions, dis-illusions, and strengths firmly at its center."), and asking me for my Top 5s!

Here is the full review and my complete list of Top 5's:

The Quintessential Interview: Chris Bohjalian

In the opening pages of The Red Lotus (Doubleday) a nurse, Alexis, and a hospital administrator, Austin, meet kind-of-cute during one chaotic Saturday night in the ER. Well, apart from the bullet in Austin’s arm that is – and apart from the fact that in a Bohjalian book, the course of most things, including true love, rarely run particularly smoothly. Six months down the road, Alexis and Austin, still in their honeymoon phase, are on a biking trip in Vietnam when Austin goes missing. Alexis, a formidable woman who readily applies her ER nursing skills to deciphering the sudden mystery, quickly becomes the most compelling voice in this story: with each of her discoveries, the central puzzle both deepens and expands. As always, Bohjalian creates a mesmerizing tale, a timely socio-political-business story with human frailties, illusions, dis-illusions, and strengths firmly at its center.

What or who are your top five writing inspirations?
1) Riding my bike. I do so much writing while riding: I solve narrative arcs, decide who will live and die (and why), and sometimes stop and write whole scenes on my phone.
2) Reading. I always have two or three books going and they always inspire me.
3) Watching movie or TV series trailers. I watch two or three every morning before I start writing.
4) The dictionary. I love words: luminescent. Cerulean. Noctivagant. I always skim the dictionary before starting work.
5) Great streaming TV or a great movie. Breaking Bad and Mad Men changed my life. Now everything I write needs to be awash in heartbreak and dread.

Top five places to write?
1) My study in Vermont with my cat, Horton, in my lap, and my dog, Jesse, asleep in her dog bed behind me.
2) A summer day, resting at mile 35 on a 50- or 60-mile bike ride, typing feverishly into my phone as I inhale an omelette and a cappuccino for sustenance.
3) The Amtrak train between Albany and Manhattan, watching the Hudson River from my window.
4) A really good bar. I wrote the opening to The Flight Attendant and a bunch of key scenes in The Red Lotus in bars.
5) An airline lounge at an airport that has artery-clogging chunks of cheese and terrible crackers.

Top five favorite authors?
Nope. Forgive me. I have too many writers who are friends. But I will tell you that among my top five dead writers might be
1) Emily Dickinson (she even appears in one of my books)
2) F Scott Fitzgerald
3) Tom Wolfe
4) Patricia Highsmith
5) Howard Frank Mosher

Top five tunes to write to?
I write in utter silence. But five songs that can inspire me are:
1) "Stockton Gala Days” by 10,000 Maniacs, especially the live version
2) "Heroes” — in German — by David Bowie (I discovered it during the closing credits to Jojo Rabbit)
3" "Out of Time” by the Rolling Stones
4) "Hero” by Family of the Year
5) “I Was Here” by Beyoncé

Top five hometown spots?
1) The Lake Champlain Bridge that spans (surprise) Lake Champlain at a narrow point and links Vermont and New York
2) The Middlebury Marquis movie theatre. You watch flicks on couches, eat really good burritos, and drink really good margaritas.
3) The Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury. The place is historic: Robert Frost would sit in a leather chair and peruse the books he had pulled down from the shelves.
4) Monroe Street Books — imagine a used bookstore the size of a supermarket.
5) Shelburne Farms — a restaurant and bed and breakfast on Lake Champlain, originally the late 19th century William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb estate. It’s gorgeous: the grounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. Even the “farm barn” makes me feel like I am visiting (warning, Game of Thrones reference, dead ahead) Winterfell.

The New York Times Review of THE RED LOTUS

I don't normally do this. But I am gobsmacked and grateful. Truly humbled.

Sarah Lyall of the New York Times has weighed in on The Red Lotus:

“Terrific. . .[an] elegant noose of a plot. . .Bohjalian is a pleasure to read. He writes muscular, clear, propulsive sentences. . .As suspenseful as it is, The Red Lotus is also unexpectedly moving — about friendship, about the connections between people and, most of all, about the love of parents for children and of children for parents. Bohjalian is a writer with a big heart and deep compassion for his characters.” — Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

Here is the link to the full review:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/bo...

My deepest thanks to Sarah Lyall and the New York Times -- and to all of you here on Goodreads for your faith in my work.

IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM, DOCTORS NEED DETECTIVE SKILLS—AND EMPATHY: Why Chris Bohjalian went looking for inspiration in the ER

A tenacious ER doctor is the heroine in my new thriller about a deadly pathogen, THE RED LOTUS. My time researching the novel with ER doctors left me gobsmacked and grateful. They ARE going to get sick as a part of our front line of defense in this pandemic. Thank God they are strong, empathetic, and courageous -- and have great senses of humor. Here is an essay I wrote about them, and why the star of THE RED LOTUS works in a New York City emergency room.

This essay appeared originally this week in Crime Reads.

++++++++

Ask ER docs for the most bizarre things they’ve ever seen in the emergency room and, invariably, they will tell you tales of inappropriate objects they have plucked from different parts of the human body. One ER doctor showed me the X-rays of them she keeps on her phone. Others will tell you of the little kids who’ve eaten Legos (lots of Legos) or wedged tiny Barbie stilettos up even tinier nostrils.

But then they’ll sit back and tell you why they choose the emergency room—and the answers surprised me. I expected they were all adrenaline junkies. And while some admit they take satisfaction in saving lives when the ER has become the sort of apocalyptic madness we see on TV, many of them are actually closet detectives and view their work rather cerebrally. As Mike Kiernan, an ER doc in Middlebury, Vermont told me, “Don’t forget: Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician before he created Sherlock Holmes.”

Holmes, of course, was the literary world’s first great sleuth, a fictional detective who, in essence, used one of a doctor’s principal tools to solve crime: pattern recognition. (Recall how important deductive reasoning was to the master detective: “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”) When it isn’t, for instance, a broken leg from a skiing accident or a deep gash on the thumb from slicing a bagel—one of the more common reasons people wind up in New York City emergency rooms on the weekend—it’s about deciphering the clues. Is this college student’s headache a migraine or is he simply hungover? Or is there more to it than that? Does this elderly woman have the flu or is it an entirely new virus? Being an ER detective can be especially challenging because, often enough, you are seeing someone in the small hours of the morning, or you’re exhausted from a 12 hour shift, or it’s one of those moments when the ER really is in chaos.

And then there is the danger: during a pandemic, ER doctors are on the front lines and many of them will wind up sick themselves. They work well aware of this risk.

I learned about ER docs while researching my new novel, The Red Lotus, because the main character is an emergency room physician. And an important part of who we are is what we are: what we do for a living. As a college freshman I took a literature course called “Perspectives on the Professions,” and it has stayed with me. We read books that focused on how characters were molded by their occupations, such as James Gould Cozzens’s classic courtroom drama, The Just and the Unjust, and Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law School, One L. As Scott Fitzgerald taught us, “Action is character,” and a whole lot of the action in our lives occurs while we are at work.

As a novelist, my characters’ jobs are often critical to both who they are and what happens in the story. Sometimes, my books have even had titles that telegraph my obsession with the nexus between what we do and who we are: Midwives. The Flight Attendant. Water Witches.

The emergency room is also one of those places we all see and, often, we see when we are at our very worst. We are in quite literal pain, we may be scared, and we may even be embarrassed. (Another reason people wind up in emergency rooms? They have just tripped over their pet.) Our breath may be toxic because it’s three in the morning or we may be holding a small child in desperate need of a fresh diaper. Kiernan said you can always tell what season it is in Vermont by the injuries and illnesses he sees: the snowmobile versus the tractor, the flu versus Lyme disease.

And so, in addition to being detectives, I think ER doctors are especially empathetic—and they experience just as much trauma as any first responder. Talk to an ER doc or trauma surgeon who’s helped care for the wounded after a mass shooting and you will witness their countenance change almost the way a war veteran’s does while recalling combat. (And then there are those ER physicians such as Rebecca Siegel, who told me that when she was an EMT and first year medical student in Israel, she was among those attacked in a mass shooting, but was uninjured—and, thus, would be among those involved in patient triage.)

Those two personality attributes, investigative curiosity and empathy, were crucial in the creation of the main character in The Red Lotus, Alexis Remnick. The novel is a thriller about—among things—a cyclist who’s found dead on a bike tour in Vietnam, but it’s also about the legacies of the Vietnam War and what it means to discover the one we love has been lying to us all along. But there are myriad scenes set in a New York City emergency room, some of which reveal bits and pieces of who Alexis is as a human being and some of which are critical to move the plot forward. An example of the former is Alexis’s time in the ER cubicle with an elderly patient whose heartburn is likely the symptom of something much worse; an example of the latter is when she digs a bullet from the biceps of the man who will become her boyfriend and with whom she will journey to Vietnam.

But like all ER physicians, she is also asking questions and always trying to think outside the box – even when she realizes she herself is in spectacular amounts of danger.

And I think that gets at the main thing I learned while researching The Red Lotus: Sometimes the best detectives wear scrubs.

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THE RED LOTUS is now on sale. Even in the midst of a quarantine, the novel is available wherever you buy or download books.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on The Red Lotus

JUST IN -- HERE IS THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW OF THE RED LOTUS ("Deductive reasoning can take you only so far in a thriller as full of surprises as this one...Unexpected revelations extend to the final sentence."). Deepest thanks to critic Tom Nolan!

Mysteries: The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
An ER doctor doubts the official explanation given for the death of her boyfriend.

By Tom Nolan

Early in the course of Chris Bohjalian’s “The Red Lotus” (Doubleday, 383 pages, $27.95), protagonist Alexis Remnick, a 33-year-old Manhattan ER doctor, has cause to remember when she first learned that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had been a physician: “She wasn’t surprised. So much of what [doctors] did . . . was detective work based largely on deductive reasoning.”

When her boyfriend of half a year, Austin Harper, disappears during their bicycling tour of Vietnam and is later found dead, Alexis is faced with a situation that might stump even the sleuth of Baker Street. Austin and Alexis worked in the same New York hospital. He wanted to go to Vietnam, he said, to visit the sites of his father’s and uncle’s wartime service. That tour of homage sent him on the solo ride that led to his death—judged by the authorities to be a hit-and-run accident.

But why would even an experienced cyclist be riding on a remote rural road after dark? How could his right hand bear the mark of a wound supposedly caused by his road mishap but which left no mark on his riding glove? Austin’s parents, whom Alexis meets for the first time after returning to the States, are hostile to her notion that their son met with foul play. The condescending father asks: “Do you have issues with mental illness?” Austin’s supervisor thinks that there’s no point to further investigating Austin’s death: “It’s a tragedy, but not a crime.”

“The Red Lotus” is written through the alternate perspectives of a number of well-drawn characters. The reader thus gains access to the thoughts of those more sympathetic to Alexis and her doubt about Austin’s demise. These include an FBI attaché, a Vietnamese police officer and a New York private detective she hires—each of whom helps her begin to discern some answers. They soon surmise that Austin had hidden his true reason for going to Vietnam; could it have had something to do with laboratory research, involving rodents and diseases of pandemic potential, taking place at the hospital where Austin and Alexis both worked?

The good and bad hunches of Alexis and her allies propel her closer to the truth, while her Holmesian devotion to “pattern recognition” never ceases: “You asked questions. . . . You worked backwards, moving intellectually from effect to cause.” But deductive reasoning can take you only so far in a thriller as full of surprises as this one. Those who relished the sudden shocks and well-timed twists of Mr. Bohjalian’s 2018 work, “The Flight Attendant,” should be well-pleased by his latest book, whose unexpected revelations extend to the final sentence.

The Book Tour Tightrope

14 March 2020

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends,

Let’s begin with what really matters: all of you. I hope I never lose sight of how blessed I am to have you in my literary life. It wasn’t all that long ago that the only people who bought my books lived on my (very) small street in Vermont or were my dad. He used to visit bookstores in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale and, if they had my new book, buy a copy. When they didn’t carry it, which was usually the case, he would tell the booksellers he was my dad and they really should stock it. Some booksellers told me he was always proud and polite — others that he was (note euphemism) passionate.

And so although THE RED LOTUS goes on sale this coming Tuesday, we are publishing it without a book tour. I am so sorry, because I love meeting you and I love bookstores and libraries.

But here is the book promotion tightrope: how do we keep you safe, but still support bookstores?

Moreover, all of you have been waiting patiently and I am deeply grateful.

THE RED LOTUS, “a diabolical plot reminiscent of a Robin Cook thriller” (Publishers Weekly) and “a dramatic dive into what happens when loves turns to agony" (Booklist), had its origins in my conversations with ER doctors, Vietnam veterans, and the scientists who work to create vaccines and combat disease. The result? A tale that begins with a dream vacation but mutates quickly into a nightmare.

Right here on Goodreads, of course, you can order your copy by clicking one of the buttons below "GET A COPY."

And if you want a signed copy? Also easy.

Very easy.

Here's another way we can celebrate this new book and support bookstores.

1. I signed thousands of copies of the novel this winter. Call your local bookstore and ask if they have some. They might!

or

2. You can get a signed book at bn.com.

or

3. If you want a signed AND personalized book, call any of these wonderful Vermont bookstores near my home before the close of day, March 21. I will sign AND personalize up to 200 copies at each store (600 total). They all ship.

- The Vermont Bookshop in Middlebury at 802 388-2061 or visit their website.

- Phoenix Books in Burlington at 802 448-3350 or visit their website.

- Barnes & Noble in South Burlington at 802 864-8001.

Please know that I am so appreciative of all of you. Thank you for your faith in my work. You are the best readers on the planet, and I never, ever want to disappoint you.

Now, stay safe. Be kind. And recall the words of Thich Nhat Hahn: “There can be no lotus flower without the mud.”

All the best,

Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com