people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that had him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.
Smith has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, Checkpoint (later published as A Vision of Angels). Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.
Smith's latest novel is Istanbul Crossing.
One novel on his recent reading list:
Havoc by Christopher BollenVisit Timothy Jay Smith's website.
The best way to hide a secret is to keep it from yourself, or so muses Maggie Burkhardt, an octogenarian who’s perfected the practice of ignoring the dark secrets in her own life. Widowed when her “perfect” husband Peter died, and only days later losing her daughter, Maggie has fled her once-idyllic but ultimately grief-filled life in Wisconsin to live in Europe, where she develops a penchant for meddling in other people’s – mostly couples’ – lives.
Occasionally, a couple’s problems arise from infidelity, but in most cases it’s Maggie’s perception that they are temperamentally mismatched, and she sets out to liberate them from relationships in which they don’t even know they’re stuck. Frequently, she concocts evidence of extramarital sex that she backs up with false accounts of what she’s witnessed. She has a remarkable list of success stories in breaking up couples, preventing marriages, and stopping adoptions; but when one situation becomes homicidal, she needs to flee again.
Eventually, she ends up at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel, a colonial grande dame on the banks of the Nile River, where she’s been living for three months when the story opens.She’s continued her meddlesome activities and is caught red-handed by eight-year-old Otto, a recent arrival traveling with his flappable mother.
Otto, smart and devilish, quickly realizes that what he’s witnessed gives him power over Maggie. He blackmails her to pay for an upgrade from a shabby room to a royal suite. He demands expensive gifts. The boy seems to be everywhere; spying on her, stealing sentimental objects from her room, and unnerving her to the point that she fantasizes killing him. Adept at internet research, the boy also unearths things from her past that lead to her confronting long-buried secrets, in the process unleashing a madness that she’d barely managed to keep at bay.
Bollen is a master storyteller and he’s at his best in Havoc. Told entirely from Maggie’s point of view, the reader is shoulder-to-shoulder with her as she slides into a state of murderous paranoia. Her battle of wits with Otto remains dark and dangerous all the way to its gut-wrenching end.
If there were a single book defining psychological suspense, it. Trigger warning: once you start, you can’t put it down.
Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (May 2019).
My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Courier.
The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Courier.
Q&A with Timothy Jay Smith.
The Page 69 Test: Fire on the Island.
The Page 69 Test: Istanbul Crossing.
Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (October 2024a).
Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (October 2024b).
--Marshal Zeringue
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