The Red Lotus Eerily Timely

The Red Lotus (2020)

By Chris Bohjalian

Doubleday, 400 pages

★★★ ½

He could not have timed it this way, but Chris Bojhalian’s new novel, The Red Lotus, will certainly resonate with current fears (obsession?) with the Covid-19 virus. The Red Lotus is a thriller in the spirit of The Andromeda Strain, The Year of the Flood, The Last One, or a Ken Follett novel.

It begins innocently enough. Alexis Remnick, a former cutter, has slowly rebuilt her life as a stoic doctor who gets her adrenaline rush by working in the emergency room of a large New York hospital instead of the razor’s edge. It’s just what she needs, a sprawling and anonymous place that’s so large she’s never even been to the fifth floor, where all things administrative occur. Ironically, her recently steady boyfriend, Austin Harper, is both a former patient she once treated for a gunshot wound sustained at a bar and an administrator on that very floor she’s never visited.

Workplace romances are generally a lousy idea, but this one is working so well that Alexis jumps at the chance to accompany Austin on a group cycling tour of Vietnam. He has done it before and assures her it’s fabulous, hence Alexis’ biggest worry is that he is a serious competitive biker and she’s the do-a-loop-around-the-park gal. Vietnam is all that Austin promised until–in thrillers there’s always an “until”–one cyclist hurts his knee, the guide decides everyone needs a rest day, and he cancels a leg of journey. Everyone except Austin is content to luxuriate by the hotel pool. He actually wanted to do that day’s grueling uphill ride to challenge himself and to pay homage to the spot where his father was wounded and his uncle was killed during the Vietnam War. Because he has done the tour before, the guide agrees to let Austin get his adrenaline rush and pedal on his own.

The next time Alexis sees Austin, it’s on a slab at the morgue–the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Being a dispassionate scientist, Alexis both identifies and briefly examines Austin’s body. There’s something vaguely unsettling about it, but she can’t quite determine why. In the meantime, Captain Nguyen and a detective named Quang, are investigating the unrelated death of a cab driver and Pham, a female lab technician. In thrillers, of course, this is more than random background detail.

I give away nothing when I tell you that Austin was not entirely whom he seemed to be. That’s clear early on. At each step of her way through shock, grief, and being sucked into the mystery, Alexis finds inconsistency and fabrication in everything about Austin. The Red Lotus evolves from romance and tragedy into a who-do-you-trust tale that involves rats, darts, a potential global pandemic, and a surprise interlocutor. As in such novels, Alexis is a latter-day Pandora who keeps opening doors she shouldn’t. Give Bojhalian credit, though; Alexis’ actions are consistent with a person used to trusting her reason and now trying to sort out what is logical and what is grief. After all, Alexis knows way more about patching up gunshot victims than in dealing with her own emotions.

She’s so torn that she hires an ex-cop detective, Ken Serafin, who is a friend of the father of Sally Gleason, one of Austin’s supervisors.  In thrillers, no one ever hires a detective and fades into the woodwork. Alexis conducts a parallel investigation by talking with more of Austin’s coworkers–even his replacement and the hospital’s administrative head. Nothing adds up. Did Austin know Pham? Who is Douglas Webber, a name that keeps popping up? What can she tell Austin’s parents and how much can she raise questions about him? It’s enough to make a bad night in the ER seem relaxing. And so it might, were it not that some kind of pandemic might be at the root of a lot of things. Or not.

Chris Bojhalian isn’t a high-toned novelist, but few rival him for embedding suspense within domestic relations. He’s also very good at puzzles, as in punching out small pieces that seem insignificant until you realize each is necessary for the picture to cohere. This makes Bojhalian eminently more readable than paint-by-the-numbers thriller writers even though, truth be told, he uses most of the same devices and resolutions.

The Red Lotus releases on St. Patrick’s Day, though were it not for the Covid-19 virus, that release date would otherwise seem premature. It is the sort of novel that has “beach read” written all over it. Here’s hoping, though, that by summer we will have a handle on the virus and you can shade yourself under a seaside umbrella and enjoy The Red Lotus as speculative, not a crystal ball.

Rob Weir