Book review: Orient by Christopher Bollen - secrets in a small town

In Orient, real estate can be murder. Or at least that's the way things seem in Christopher Bollen's dark, atmospheric new novel, which pits summer residents against year-rounders, old-timers against anti-development forces, the familiar face against the stranger.

Enemies can be anywhere when wealth is at stake, especially once the bodies of your neighbours begin to pile up.

Set in a real-life town on the tip of Long Island - a terrific, isolated setting that Bollen uses to great effect - Orient opens as the season is ending and the summer people are beginning to head back to the city. Moving in the opposite direction is Mills Chevern (not his real name, he tells us in the prologue). A 19-year-old former foster child from Modesto who made his way to New York City and binged on drugs, Mills has luckily befriended middle-aged architect Paul Benchley, who grew up in Orient.

His parents dead, Paul needs help cleaning out his family's estate, and Mills needs somewhere to live and something to do so he won't fall back into bad habits.

But as an outsider, Mills immediately draws the distrust of many of the year-round residents, not necessarily because he's gay but because of his sketchy past. The edginess grows when the town handyman is found drowned and a frightening mutant creature washes up onshore, possibly refuse from a research lab long suspected of vile biological experiments. After a second suspicious death, Mills finds himself a suspect.