Breakfast with the Borgias

I am beginning to see this place as a kind of hell,” declares Ariel Panek halfway through DBC Pierre’s novella, Breakfast with the Borgias. It’s an oddly superstitious statement from a professor of computer science, but then Ariel’s flight from Boston to Amsterdam has been diverted to Stansted Airport due to heavy fog, and Ariel has found himself marooned at the Cliffs Hotel on the remote Suffolk coast.

Ariel, who plans to continue his illicit affair with undergraduate student Zeva once he gets to Amsterdam, believes his experience has become hellish because he can’t get an internet connection to let her know he has been delayed. By that point, however, the reader is aware that something far more sinister than an absence of wifi is stalking our hero.