In fantastic thriller, a mysterious man ... and rats

THRILLER

By Chris Bohjalian (Doubleday)

We all know what it’s like to worry that something terrible has happened to a person we care about, as the hours pass, and there is still no word, and even implausible explanations (flat tire, broken phone) become increasingly unlikely. Plunging his main character into that excruciating situation — subjecting her to that “great, black maw of fear” — is the first diabolical thing that Chris Bohjalian does in his terrific new thriller, “The Red Lotus.”

The second is to force us to think about rats. The rats in this story seem a background curiosity at first, something we can ignore just as people in cities ignore the rats covertly overrunning the subways and parks. In an intermittent, parallel tale narrated by someone whose identity is concealed until the end of the book, the rats’ qualities are described: their adaptability, their ubiquity, their usefulness in lab studies, their skill at building immunity to virulent pathogens.

The significance of these apparent asides becomes increasingly obvious, until it is clear that rats are vitally important to the elegant noose of a plot being tied around our necks. As Bohjalian points out, rats are “the most effective delivery vehicle for mass death ever to exist on earth.”

The human part of this novel begins on a bicycle tour in Vietnam, when a young man named Austin Harper, who works in the development office of a New York City hospital, inexplicably fails to return at the end of a day of riding. His girlfriend of less than a year, Alexis Remnick, an emergency room doctor in the same hospital who is also on the tour, senses that something is wrong. She is correct.

But the eventual discovery of Austin’s battered body by the side of the road after a terrible accident is only the start of a series of increasingly weird, creepy and unexpected developments. Alexis has very little time to adjust to the quick succession of new realities. Luckily, she is smart, perceptive and levelheaded, not one to waste her time ignoring the truth.

Reality No. 1: Her cute, loving, funny boyfriend is dead. Reality No. 2: He had told several seemingly small but puzzling lies about his reasons for wanting to come to Vietnam. Reality No. 3: He has been struck by a car, but the nasty puncture wound and broken bone Alexis spots on his hand suggest to her that he may have been tortured first.

The overriding new reality: Nothing is as it had seemed, and Alexis, an anxious person who in her youth alleviated stress with self-harm, has fallen into a new world of uncertainty and danger.

What to withhold, what to reveal, when to dole out information and in what manner — these are among the hardest decisions for an author to make in any thriller, particularly one with this many moving parts. Bohjalian strikes a fine balance between disclosure and secrecy. We soon learn more than Alexis does — including what led to Austin’s death and (after a while) what is going on with the rats — but there are many intriguing questions that Bohjalian takes his time answering.

What really happened to Austin at the bar the night he met Alexis? What is the significance of those little packets of energy gel he had with him in Vietnam? If the marks on his fingers were not cat bites, as he claimed, then what exactly were they?

And, perhaps worst of all: Why did the backpack he carried with him the day of his fatal bike ride contain, among other things, a dress for a woman who was size zero, when there is no way Alexis could fit into something that small?

Alexis becomes an amateur detective of sorts, but she is also a fully realized character. Haunted by the sudden death of her father when she was little and at odds with her high-achieving, overly critical mother, she is well suited to her job in the ER, which constantly reminds her of life’s fragility, of how close we live to the abyss.

There’s an array of pleasantly unsettling characters here. A special shoutout to Douglas Webber, champion darts player and rat enthusiast; and to Oscar Bolton, his nervous, younger sidekick; and to a couple of people determined to help Alexis discover the truth. Ken Sarafian — a private investigator and ex-cop who has grim memories of his time serving in Vietnam and who recently lost a daughter to cancer — proves to be a particularly satisfying ally, with his psychological acuity, his sixth sense for deception, his dogged research skills and his Glock semi-automatic pistol.

Bohjalian is a pleasure to read. He writes muscular, clear, propulsive sentences. Even his unlikely scenes ring true, as in a tour-de-force climactic episode set inside a rat-research lab in which three of the four characters present are suddenly incapacitated in different ways.

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.