The people who are supposed to help heal cause great harm in this gripping psychological thriller narrated by a misanthropic doctor to rich and famous people in the "creative professions". Stars are drawn to Dr Marc Schlosser's reputation for being liberal in dispensing attention and prescriptions, but Schlosser is getting increasingly impatient with his patients.

The unreliable narrator is a tool skilfully handled by Dutch author Herman Koch whose previous novel, The Dinner, his first to be translated into English, sold over one million copies and is being adapted for a film directed by Cate Blanchett. The untrustworthy narrator Schlosser here creates the dark comedy that pervades the albeit less slickly developed narrative.

The reader becomes most submerged in this gruesome story when Schlosser and his wife and daughters are invited on holiday by one of his patients, film star Ralph and his wife and sons. The novel's title derives from the advertisement for the holiday property, but the supposedly idyllic setting becomes a scene of horror, for bubbling beneath the surface of these holidaymakers are destructive impulses and transgressive desires that burst through catastrophically.

Koch uses language like a stethoscope, so that we can hear the beating hearts of his characters and their visceral feelings of envy, love, fear and hatred. It is the sense of panic that Koch excels at evoking: "The heart is preparing for flight, I knew that as a doctor. For flight or a fight," observes Schlosser of his own pounding heart. Ralph is pronounced dead, but is Schlosser guilty of medical error or murder?

The novel anatomises our most unsavoury impulses with scalpel-like prose; more squeamish readers may be put off by the graphic scenes, but for fans of thrillers such as Gone Girl, this should be the summer's essential reading.