“I’d love to kill you sometime,” murmurs a character in “One of Us,” all but announcing the quiet, matter-of-fact evil that will drive him to pursue the book’s protagonists over the next 200 pages.

Charlie is his name. Or, at least, that’s what he calls himself but he also says he’s the uncle of sister-and-brother escapees Eleanor and Bolt and we know for sure that isn’t true. Whatever his name is, he’s a violent criminal who murders strangers as if to relieve an itch, who is casually racist and who wants to possess the siblings because he believes they have supernatural gifts.

That’s also why a traveling circus wants them in Dan Chaon’s novel, which is set in the early 1900s. The adolescent siblings, who are orphans, flee from their uncle’s “care” and fall in with a circus, where their

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