Book Summary and Reviews of The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian

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Debbie Digs Reading

The Red Lotus
The Red Lotus immediately grabbed my attention and had me wanting to know more! I read late into the night and found myself anxiously getting back to the book as quickly as possible after work. Chris Bohjalian’s writing style is very engaging and easy to follow. Pick this book up and you won’t want to stop until you have all the answers!

Cathryn Conroy

Hold onto Your Reading Chair! This Intelligent Thriller Takes You on an Exhilarating Ride
This novel, written long before "Covid-19" or "coronavirus" were in our everyday lexicon, has an eerie ring of verisimilitude. So if the daily headlines aren't scary enough for you, grab this book—but don't plan on getting anything else done for a while because you won't be able to stop reading it.

In this stunning and intelligent thriller by Chris Bohjalian, it's a race against time pitting the initially clueless good guys against the evil, moneygrubbing bad guys to prevent a pandemic of an antibiotic-resistant plague from spreading around the world.

A plot summary is impossible to give without significant spoilers. Suffice it to say that Alexis, an emergency room physician at a busy New York City hospital, and Austin, who works in the hospital's development department, are dating. Austin, an avid bicyclist, wants to return to Vietnam for another bike tour so he can pay his respects to the sites where his uncle died and his father was wounded in that unpopular war 50 years ago. On the second-to-last day of their trip, Austin vanishes. And then the real story takes off like a rocket. Hold onto your reading chair! This is going to be an exhilarating ride.

Bohjalian has mastered the thriller genre with aplomb and creativity. The characters are realistic — good in the right ways so we readers like them and flawed just enough to make them human — and the plot is absolutely riveting and spine-tingling right to the very end. Anything can happen, and sometimes I didn't see it coming, which makes it even better.

What a book!

techeditor

Almost no one is who they seem
I can’t speak highly enough of THE RED LOTUS.

?If your preferred genre is thriller but so many books billed as "psychological thriller" don’t do much for you, if you want a literary thriller and one that is intelligent, THE RED LOTUS is for you. This book is a 5-star can’t-put-it-down read, and Chris Bohjalian obviously assumes his readers are smart.

Alexis, an ER doctor, and her boyfriend Austin, who works at the same hospital but on the administrative end, are visiting Vietnam on a bike tour. When Austin takes off for a solo bike ride but does not return by the appointed time, police in Vietnam begin their investigation. Soon thereafter Austin’s body is found, and a thrilling mystery begins.

Even after Alexis returns to the United States, the police captain in Vietnam continues his investigation. But Alexis can’t just sit and wait; she hires a private investigator to look into what happened and why.

Remember as you read this: almost no one is who they seem.

Sandi W.

all are always so different...
One of the things I really enjoy about Bohjalians's books is that they are always so different and all are so well researched. You are never sure what topic he will be writing about next.

Normally I am very fond of Bohjalian's topics and story lines. However in this book, not so much! There is an animal in this book that I don't particularly care for and it was written about over and over again. Don't get me wrong, the mention of this animal was pertinent to the story, it just gave me the creeps.

So this was not a favorite Bohjalian read. The story was well put together. His research was spot on. The characters were believable. But the animal used throughout the story was too often and too vividly written for me to really enjoy the book.

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