The Uninvited

On page one, a young girl kills her grandmother with a nail gun.

Cut to Hesketh, our narrator hero. He is an anthropologist with Asperger's Syndrome who works for a multinational corporation that salvages the reputations of its international clients when their prestigious corporations make enormous and very public blunders. As the novel begins, he learns that the whistleblower in one recent incident has committed suicide. Hesketh is among the first to piece together the correlation between the increasing number of homicidal children and suicidal whistleblowers and industrial saboteurs.

Liz Jensen writes a very literary and weird variation on the kind of international thriller that appears regularly on bestseller lists. There is some globetrotting - Taipei, Dubai, Stockholm - but the plot soon focuses on Hesketh's devotion to the son of his estranged lover. The boy kills his mother by pushing her down the stairs.

World civilization is falling apart, and the likely explanation involves time-traveling spirits that possess their victims. The principal variation from traditional thriller themes in Jensen's book is that her main character is an observer, not a savior. She is willing to let the collapse occur. Her interest, like that of her protagonist, is in the details.