Christopher Bollen presents the Great American Novel – as whodunnit

Bollen’s second novel invites comparisons with Donna Tartt and Jonathan Franzen.

A quiet town in remote Long Island is the scene of several murders in Bollen’s gripping novel. Getty Images

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the title of Christopher Bollen's captivating new novel is an homage to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.

The coincidence, it seems, is too good to be true, but Bollen’s Orient is the very real village that sits on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island; the land mass that lies “like the body of a woman floating in New York harbor” thinks Mills Chevern, the 19-year-old Californian drifter through whose eyes we see much of Bollen’s second novel.

Chevern claims to have envisioned the island thus from the very first time he saw it on a map, but the events that played out during the autumn months he spends in the village can’t help but have coloured his judgement. Not long after his arrival, an all-too-real dead body is found bobbing in Orient Harbor: that of Jeff Trader, a local handyman, keeper of keys, and thus the secrets of the Orient residents whose homes he looks after.

The unexpected death of another “year-rounder” occurs days later, swiftly followed by a devastating house fire. As the locals close ranks, the collective finger of suspicion points towards Chevern, though Bollen had me guessing until the bitter end whether he’s a scapegoat of happenstance, naive pawn, or as untrustworthy as many suspect: no mean feat for a first-time mystery writer.

Bollen's first book Lightning People was very much a New York novel, his protagonists negotiating loss and anxiety in the aftermath of 9/11. Although ostensibly about this small, isolated community on Long Island and geographically removed from the city, interestingly Orient is still in many ways a Manhattan novel. There's a tension between Orient's long-term/year-rounder residents and the new influx of wealthy artists seeking a "bohemian art colony" away from the galleries of Chelsea, the former viewing the latter as "savages, trying to steal the land from those to whom it properly belonged".

Bollen (whose day job is editor-at-large for Interview magazine, a publication founded by Andy Warhol in the 60s) is intimately familiar with this scene – this migration from the city is a very real phenomenon, and the idea for the novel came to him while he was staying in the house of artist friends in Orient.

His depiction of these interlopers is razor-sharp: “Luz Wilson exploited Orient the way all new settlers do, making it hers by reframing its past to her liking. She tracked down surviving descendants of old Orient families who no longer owned their estates – field farmers, mostly, and a few roughnecks who vivisected fish on the Greenport docks – and paid them one dollar more than the minimum wage to come to her studio at the farmhouse to pose for her.”

He hovers on the edge of caricature, but never loses control; each and every one of his subjects has his or her place in the mystery that unfurls. The essential pace and tension for the successful rendering of a murder mystery is delicately balanced with the scope and skill of a Great American Novel; complete with state of the nation comment and the depiction of a broad cross-section of society. There's a darkness distinctly similar to that discernible in the work of Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt; the tension between community and claustrophobia that is the hallmark of every tale of small-town America, from Peyton Place to Twin Peaks; and finally a particular take on the idea of the American Dream, one which explores notions of home and belonging, what it means to have roots somewhere, and, on the flip side of this, what it means to be adrift and homeless like Chevern, "alive for 19 years, but he worried he would forever remain an incidental set of fingerprints in the lives of others".

There are twists and turns ­aplenty – enough to keep even the most devoted murder mystery aficionado engrossed – but Orient is so much more than a simple ­whodunnit.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.