Children of Wolves

The expat dream sells itself the same way everywhere: cheaper wine, warmer sea, a version of yourself that finally has time to read on a balcony. Lawrence Osborne has built a career on what happens next, once the light goes flat and someone realizes the ease was never free. Children of Wolves picks up that thread at a seaside hotel in Turkey, where the good life is available to anyone who can stop asking who is paying for it.

What it's about

The setup is pure Osborne. A cast of foreigners drifts through a glossy Turkish resort, insulated by money and the peculiar confidence of people far from home. Paradise for expats, until the bill arrives. From the coast the story moves to Istanbul, a city that has always been good at swallowing outsiders whole and the mood tightens as the season turns. Osborne keeps the premise lean on purpose. What is on offer here is not a puzzle box of twists so much as a slow reveal of character: who these people are when the hotel staff stop smiling and what they are willing to overlook to keep the fantasy intact. The suspense comes from watching comfort curdle in real time.

Why everyone's talking about it

Osborne is often called the heir to Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith and this is the terrain he owns: privileged people in beautiful places, making quietly terrible decisions. Readers who loved The Forgiven or Beautiful Animals already know the pleasure on offer, the prose that treats a cocktail hour like a crime scene waiting to happen. If you come to suspense for velocity and a tidy confession by the last chapter, this may test your patience. Osborne moves at the pace of a long lunch. But if you want atmosphere so thick you can feel the heat coming off the paving stones, plus a moral queasiness that lingers past the final page, few working writers deliver it with such control. This is a book for the reader who underlines sentences, not the one racing to the reveal.

The verdict, for now

Early buzz suggests Osborne is doing what he does best, which is to say the sun is out, the drinks are cold and something is very quietly going wrong. Read it if you like your suspense literary and your protagonists a little bit doomed. Just maybe book your own Turkish holiday first, before this one talks you out of the whole idea.