A tale of survival on safari

It all sounded so glamorous. The Hollywood starlet. Her famous best friends. They’re the lions of Hollywood, on their way to a luxury safari in the Serengeti. What could possibly go wrong? Well, just about everything. In Chris Bohjalian’s latest book, “The Lioness,” things are calm for all of a dozen pages before the roar — both human and animal — begins.

But in that calm, the stage is set. It’s 1964 and Katie Barstow is the queen of Hollywood. The daughter of celebrity theater folk with a legacy of alcohol and abuse, she ran to the West Coast.

She’s decided to turn her honeymoon adventure into a buddy moon. Katie’s just married David Hill — a struggling gallerist who is also her brother’s best friend from childhood. Joining them on safari are seven others — including Terrance Dutton, a Black actor whose star is rising.

They’re all in the care of Charlie Patton, a white hunter who holds fast to his machismo and his handlebar mustache.

And so it begins. The travelers are learning from the guides, witnessing the power of wildebeests crossing the Mara River and the beauty of giraffes at a watering hole. But very quickly, the cameras are dropped. Men in a Land Rover appear out of nowhere. There are gunshots, and it’s clear that they’re not aiming at the giraffes.

The armed men are ruthless Russian mercenaries. They brutally kidnap the Americans and their guides. The mantra for all becomes: “Just stay alive. See if, somehow, we might see the sun rise one more time.”

As the drama plays out, Bohjalian divides the narration between all nine Americans and Benjamin Kikwete, one of the group’s young Kenyan porters. The gaggle of narrators means that no one has enough page time for deep character development, but what’s there is rich enough to be revelatory, is expertly woven into the present, and the short chapters and changing cast are what turns “The Lioness” into a bloody sprint of a read.

Set against the backdrop of the Congo Crisis and the Simba rebellion, while also touching on American racism, there are so many reasons the famous group could have been captured, and the unraveling of it all is captivating. But even more so is how a group of prominent people react when they’ve landed in hell, and the reason behind their reactions.

Pulled in by the promise of thrills or the guarantee of glamour, readers will stay for the game of survivor(s), and finish the book as satisfied as a fat cat in the Serengeti.