{"id":3363,"date":"2025-10-12T18:40:54","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T02:40:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3363"},"modified":"2025-10-12T18:40:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T02:40:54","slug":"review-havoc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3363","title":{"rendered":"Review: Havoc"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Havoc<\/em> is a thriller with an interesting set-up.  It is told in the first person from the point of view of an octogenarian agent of chaos.  She&#8217;s on the leisurely lam from some earlier incident gone wrong after starting to travel after the death of her husband.  It is set in the pandemic, but that&#8217;s basically not a real factor in the story.  Christopher Bollen occasionally invokes it as a difficulty in managing travel or contact but in another time plenty of other causes could fill those plot holes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Overall, <em>Havoc<\/em> is well crafted and diverting.  Our narrator is interesting, but obviously untrustworthy.  If nothing else her justifications of her casually sowing strife in others relationships smacks of self-deception.  A lot of the fun is figuring out what is really driving her and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And on paper the answers are interesting and satisfying.  The plot gears all mesh.  There are dropped hints that slipped under the RADAR.  All the things that make a psychological thriller work are there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But for me, the big twist just rubbed me the wrong way.  I know it is just me, but the reveal just took me out of the story in a way I could not recover from.  Probably worth a try if you are not me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Havoc is a thriller with an interesting set-up. It is told in the first person from the point of view of an octogenarian agent of chaos. She&#8217;s on the leisurely lam from some earlier incident gone wrong after starting to travel after the death of her husband. It is set in the pandemic, but that&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3364,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3363\/revisions\/3364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}