CANR

• The Doorman - 2025 MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY
• Two Nights in Lisbon - 2022 MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Chris Pavone
  USA flag (b.1968)

  Chris Pavone grew up in New York City, and attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn and Cornell University, where He majored in government. He worked at a number of publishing houses over nearly two decades, most notably as an editor at Clarkson Potter, where he specialized in cookbooks (he loves to cook). In the late nineties, He also wrote a little book called The Wine Log. He now lives in Greenwich Village and the North Fork of Long Island.

  Awards: Edgar (2013), Anthony (2013) see all

  Genres: Thriller

  Series
  Expats
  1. The Expats (2012)
  2. The Paris Diversion (2019)
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  Novels
  The Accident (2014)
  The Travelers (2016)
  Two Nights in Lisbon (2022)
  The Doorman (2025)
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  Novellas and Short Stories
  The Parents' Association (2025)
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  Awards
  2013 Edgar Award for Best First Novel : The Expats
  2013 Anthony Award for Best First Novel : The Expats

• Chris Pavone website - https://www.chrispavone.com/

  CHRIS PAVONE’s international thrillers include THE EXPATS, winner of both the Edgar and Anthony Awards; the instant bestseller TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON; and, most recently, THE DOORMAN. His novels have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and IndieNext; have won or been shortlisted for Edgar, Anthony, Strand, Macavity, and ThrillerFest awards, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; are in development for film and television; and have been translated into two dozen languages.

  He has written for outlets including the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the Telegraph, and Salon; has appeared on Face the Nation, Good Day New York, All Things Considered, and the BBC; and has been profiled on the arts’ front page of the New York Times. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America, for which he has served as an Edgars judge, and sits on the Authors Guild Council.

  Chris grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Midwood High School and Cornell University, and worked in publishing for nearly two decades at Dell Magazines, Doubleday, the Lyons Press, Regan/HarperCollins, Clarkson Potter, and Artisan/Workman, in positions ranging from copy editor and managing editor to executive editor and deputy publisher; he also wrote a (mostly blank) book about wine, and ghost-wrote a couple of nonfiction books. Then his wife got a job in Luxembourg, and the family moved abroad, where Chris raised their twin boys and started writing THE EXPATS. They now live again in New York City and on the North Fork of Long Island with a Labradoodle named Wally.

• The Bookworm - https://bookwormofedwards.com/interview-chris-pavone

  nterview with Chris Pavone
  Bookworm: Kate is such a badass protagonist. Where do you find continuing inspiration for her character? Why do you feel she resonates with both male and female readers?

  Chris Pavone: Kate is a stressed-out parent with a faltering career, and misgivings about her life’s biggest choices, and a spouse who sometimes drives her nuts. That’s pretty universal, isn’t it? But Kate also happens to be facing these problems in Luxembourg (in my first book) and in Paris (the new one), which makes her problems just a little more interesting. Plus some of her solutions involve spycraft, weapons, and lethal violence, which makes them a lot more exciting.

  I invented Kate a decade ago, when I’d followed my wife’s career to Luxembourg, and found myself without my well-established identities—career, social network, home. I channeled the challenges and frustrations of my unsettled, unfamiliar life into this fictional character, a person going through a very similar experience of becoming an expat trailing spouse, trying to create a whole new life for her family, and a whole new identify for herself. This is a moment of excitement but also of doubt and vulnerability; of possibility but also fear and risk. I think Kate’s predicament is something we can all relate to, a situation we can all imagine ourselves in. Because the book was a thriller, I added a few elements that are less commonplace and a lot more exciting, but at heart I still wanted Kate to be a character whose problems we can all identify with, whose triumphs we can imagine as our own.

  BW: Your books never feel stale - they are so current to technology and world events. How much does the news influence your writing?

  CP: I write the sorts of high-stakes contemporary plots that have no choice but to address real-world news and technology—international intelligence and espionage, electronic banking and hacking and cyber-security. But I don’t want the books to be about those sideshows, which are never what I find most compelling about fiction. Above all, what I care about are characters—their motivations, their conflicts, their passions, even their hatreds. So I try not to allow too much news or tech to contaminate my stories; I want these details to support the plot, not the other way around. Just because I spent days researching a subject doesn’t mean you need to read any of it.

  BW: Ah, Paris! What is your favorite landmark/location in this book? How did you conduct your research about it?

  CP: One of my goals is for readers to feel like they’ve been transported to someplace beautiful and exciting—that you can see and hear and smell the Argentinean pampas and Mexico’s zócalos, Venice’s secluded walkways and the rugged end-of-the-worldness of Iceland’s coastal cliffs. And of course Paris, which I’ve visited more or less annually for a decade, and for this book I met with a few people—a friend who works at the Louvre, another who’s a bookseller, a journalist—over drinks and food in extremely appealing places. So this research of mine wasn’t exactly of the onerous sort.

  I love so much about the city (which is probably why at least parts of all four of my novels are set there); it’s one of those places where the touristed sites really are as wonderful as you’d hope. And perhaps the most dramatic is the Eiffel Tower, which there are a lot of ways to experience, at different levels of effort and expense; I think I’ve done all of them. My favorite happens to be one that’s easy and 100 percent free: watching the tower’s light show at dusk from a nearby bridge, with the Seine in the foreground. In The Paris Diversion, this is the diverting backdrop to the final confrontation of threats and violence, death and redemption. But for me and you in real life, it’s five minutes of quiet perfection.

  BW: What are you reading now?

  CP: I’ve read a lot of great novels this spring, and I think my favorites have been Juliet Grames’s debut The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, a wonderful story about the twists, turns, and near-deaths of one woman’s long eventful life; and A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle, an unusually titled but terrific noir.

• Trailing-Spouse.com - https://www.trailing-spouse.com/chris-pavone/#more-3274

  Book ClubExpat ExperiencesTrailing Kids
  Turning Trailing Life into Thrilling Material
  written by Chris Pavone July 8, 2022
  Turning Trailing Life into Thrilling Material
  Editor’s Note: The inspiration for Chris Pavone’s 2012 bestselling debut novel, The Expats, came from his 18-month experience as a trailing spouse in Luxembourg. Now the author of five thrilling novels, including the recently released Two Nights in Lisbon, he has agreed to share his own story with our readers as part of our Trailing-Spouse Book Club.

  Need a summer reading recommendation? Check these out!
  How did you become a trailing spouse?
  My wife and I both worked in book publishing. One evening, she came home from work and asked, “What would you think of living in Luxembourg?” I was nearly 40 years old, and except for my college years at Cornell University in upstate New York, I’d never lived anywhere other than my hometown of New York City. This felt like a pretty big hole in a repertoire of life experiences, a problem that could be solved simply by saying yes. So I did.

  How did your experience compare to what you had imagined?
  All of it was more difficult than I imagined. I was living in a county where I had no friends or support system, and didn’t know how to do anything — throw out the garbage park the car, buy appliances. It was disorienting, alienating, and lonely.

  And yet, all of the difficulties were much more rewarding than I could’ve expected.

  How would you rank your move using the Gupte Scale?
  10/15. The timing was perfect, the destination was so-so, and the support as insufficient.

  How did your relocation present a challenge for you, personally and professionally?
  I left behind what felt like my entire identity — my friends and family and career and hometown and everything that made me me — not to mention the nanny who’d been taking care of our 4-year-old twins. So in one fell swoop, I suddenly became a person with no career who was a full-time caregiver to two young children, in a country where I had zero friends, didn’t speak the language, and didn’t know how to do anything.

  My boys, skiing and making friends in the French Alps
  In my Luxembourg expat world, at least 95 percent of the trailing spouses were women, and I never made any genuine friends who were men. Mine was a world of women, of other men’s wives, and I felt acutely that this created significant barriers to friendship — invitations that were not offered to me, others that I could not accept, relationships and occasions that would have looked or felt inappropriate, or suspect, or simply uncomfortable. So in addition to all the other challenges, I was very lonely.

  How did you make the most of your move, demonstrating grit and creativity?
  I’d been working in book publishing for two decades, always intending to try to write fiction, and I hoped Luxembourg would be a great opportunity to finally do it. First I gave myself a school year as a trailing spouse to focus on just that —to build a new life, to become a different type of parent, to make friends, have hobbies, a social calendar. We didn’t know when we’d be moving back to New York, if ever, so I needed to treat Luxembourg as if it were permanent.

  On the first day of our second school year, I dropped the kids at school, then took my laptop to a café. I opened a new document, and typed The Expats at the top of the page; at first all I really had was the title. But three years later, that book was a major international bestseller, with a film deal and translations into two dozen languages, a successful launch into a new career. A decade on, I’ve just published my fifth bestselling international thriller, Two Nights in Lisbon.

  What lessons have you learned that you would like to share with others?
  If we hadn’t moved abroad, I’d never have chosen to live without childcare. The transition was difficult for me, as a parent and as a spouse and as a formerly professional person moving through the world with no profession. It took me a long time to accept saying “I’m home with the children” in response to “What do you do?” My twins are now 18 years old, they’re about to move to university and begin their independent lives, and this stage of being home with kids is coming to an end. It has been, without question, my life’s greatest satisfaction.

  Anything else you would like to add about your experience as a trailing spouse?
  When our boys had just turned five, we drove to the French Alps for a ski vacation. After a long day in ski school, then dinner, the kids still had energy to go out into the snow in the dark cold to sled, careening down the slope in glee, then dragging their sleds up the hill, again and again. I noticed that another boy had joined mine, and the three of them seemed to be talking, laughing, up and down, up and down.

  When my kids finally called it a night, I asked Alex what he’d been talking about with the other boy, in what language. It was French, and Alex really didn’t understand almost anything. “But sometimes, Daddy, when I don’t understand someone, I just smile and say oui.” That struck me as an excellent motto for an expat, and a life approach I’ve tried to embrace during the past dozen years: smile and say yes.

  Got a relocation story of your own to share? Contact us at hello@trailing-spouse.com.

• The Nerd Daily - https://thenerddaily.com/chris-pavone-the-doorman-author-interview/

  Q&A: Chris Pavone, Author of ‘The Doorman’
  Elise Dumpleton·Writers Corner·May 21, 2025·4 min read

  Share
  We chat with author Chris Pavone about The Doorman, which is a pulse-pounding novel of class, privilege, sex, and murder.

  Hi, Chris! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
  I was born and raised in New York City, and except for college and a brief sojourn as an expat in Luxembourg, I’ve only ever lived here. And I’ve only ever worked in book publishing—for the first half of my career as an editor, then as a novelist, and I’ve now published six thrillers. I’ve been married for a quarter-century, and I’m the parent of college-student twins and the best dog ever in the history of dogs.

  When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
  I’ve loved stories as long as I can remember, and somehow in college I decided that I wanted to be a writer, though in all honesty I don’t remember why, or what I thought that meant. How do young people decide what to do with their lives? It’s alchemy. But I didn’t want to put all my eggs into this one flimsy and unreliable basket, so instead I got into publishing. If the writing never worked out, I reasoned, I could have a rewarding career as an editor, which seemed preferable to the other tenuous paths to becoming a novelist. And I loved it. Book publishing is populated by my favorite types of people, who are motivated by my favorite types of reasons, and pretty far down on that list is money. No one gets into publishing to get rich.

  I eventually tired of the publishing business for the normal reason that people get tired of careers: I found myself wading through the swamp of middle-management. So I quit office life, spent some time ghost-writing, book-doctoring. Then my wife got a job in Luxembourg, we moved abroad, and I started writing The Expats when I was 41 years old. It was a New York Times bestseller, won a couple of awards, and was translated into two dozen languages.

  Quick lightning round! Tell us:
  The first book you ever remember reading: The Kid Who Batted 1.000, a baseball novel for kids.
  The one that made you want to become an author: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and in particular the five-word chapter from the point of view of Vardaman: “My mother is a fish.”
  The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, because everyone keeps comparing my new novel to it.
  Your latest novel, The Doorman, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
  Race, class, money, sex, murder.

  What can readers expect?
  Race, class, money, and sex combust into murder. It’s pretty clear from the opening sentence that someone is going to die. The reader’s journey is to discover who, and when, and how, and perhaps most interestingly, why.

  Where did the inspiration for The Doorman come from?
  A half-decade ago we moved into a famous New York apartment house, and I became friends with an incredible doorman. This novel isn’t based on either the real building or the real doorman, but it was inspired by both.

  Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
  Is it unbecoming to say all of it? I love the little moments of New Yorkiness on the subway, at school drop-off, in a restaurant. I love the set pieces—the racism-tinged coop board meeting, the performative-progressive gala, the sexy onset of the extramarital affair. I love the minor characters, from the building’s prison-tatted Ukrainian super and the Black Liberation Theology porter to the cameo characters Skye Walker and the academese-spewing educator called QR Code, and I love even the villains—the profiteer-billionaire douchebag, the private-militia lunatic. I love the little boy who weighs his poop, I love the little girl who wants a land acknowledgment for the ingenious Lenape, I love the old spaniel. But most of all I love the three main characters, I love their struggles, their solutions, I love the momentous decisions they make at the fateful fatal end of this story.

  See also

  Q&A: C.B. Lee, Author of ‘Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe’
  Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
  I’m normally a very deliberate, very anticipatory writer: I figure out what I want to do before I do it. But I started writing this book during covid, when I was working badly for a variety of reasons that are obvious now but I didn’t see then. I didn’t do enough planning, so I didn’t know where the book was aiming, so I foundered for nearly a year, stumbling into dead ends, exploring unproductive plot lines, writing superfluous scenes. Eventually I admitted to myself that I needed to go back to the beginning, figure it all out—create an outline, justify every scene, every character. I threw away a tremendous amount of material, rethought and reorganized and rewrote everything else. It was frustrating, and took a lot of time, and it looked like a very bad process. But then again this is the best book I’ve ever written, and that messy process was what got me here, so who knows? Maybe it was exactly the right way to go about it.

  What’s next for you?
  Beyond The Doorman, the main thing I’m doing is trying to turn one of my previous novels into a feature film, which has been tremendous fun.

  Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
  Two memoirs, both for very personal reasons: When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter, whose old apartment I now live in; and I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally, whose first book project was The Balthazar Cookbook, which I acquired, edited, and published two decades ago. Those guys both represent a very specific vision of downtown New York from my downtown youth, that cookbook is still one of my all-time favorite projects, I still eat in Keith’s restaurants, and I now keep my books on Graydon’s built-in bookshelves.

• Cornellians - https://alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/author-pavone/

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  The bestselling author’s latest thriller follows a heroine with a secret past—and a kidnapped husband

  By Beth Saulnier

  Accompanying her new husband on a business trip to Portugal, a woman named Ariel Pryce wakes up alone in their hotel room. She’s positive that something bad has happened to him—but since he has only been gone a few hours, neither the Lisbon police nor the U.S. embassy will take her seriously.

  Has he been kidnapped, or worse? And how well does his wife really know him? It’s up to Ariel—a small-town bookseller who’s seemingly unprepared for international intrigue—to figure it out, even if it means putting herself in harm’s way.

  That’s the jumping-off point for Two Nights in Lisbon, the latest thriller by Chris Pavone ’89, a bestselling author whose previous outings have garnered top awards in mystery fiction.

  the cover of 'two nights in lisbon'
  And as Pavone’s fans will suspect before they even crack open the cover, there’s much more to Ariel than meets the eye.

  Her fraught, twisty journey to rescue her husband will not only awaken her memories of past trauma, but threaten powerful men at the highest echelons of U.S. government.

  “I defy anyone to read the first twenty pages of this breakneck novel, then try to put it down for five minutes,” superstar author John Grisham says in a blurb.

  “It can’t be done. The plot is too devious; the pace is too gripping; and the characters are seldom who they are supposed to be. This is smart suspense at its very best.”

  A government major on the Hill, Pavone spent two decades as a book editor before segueing to the other side of the publishing industry.

  The inspiration for his 2012 debut novel, The Expats—which won the coveted Edgar and Anthony awards and made the New York Times bestseller list—sprang from Pavone’s experience as a trailing spouse in Luxembourg, where his family (then including 4-year-old twins) moved for his wife’s job.

  “I was living in a country where I had no friends or support system, and didn’t know how to do anything—throw out the garbage, park the car, buy appliances,” he recalls.

  chris pavone signing books
  At a book signing. (Photo provided)
  “It was disorienting and alienating, and I decided to write about that. But it was a whiny, empty book in which somebody like me was complaining, ‘Life is hard, boo-hoo’—and I realized that nobody would want to read it. So I put it aside.”

  It eventually struck Pavone that Luxembourg was filled with fellow expatriates, many in fields—like diplomacy and high finance—that offer rich fodder for an international thriller.

  His heroine in The Expats appears to be a typical American wife and mother living abroad and enjoying the pleasures of Europe—but she has a clandestine past that even her husband may not suspect.

  The New York Times Book Review calls the novel “smartly executed” and “thoroughly captivating,” raving: “Pavone is full of sharp insights into the parallels between political espionage and marital duplicity.”

  Pavone followed The Expats with The Accident, The Travelers, and The Paris Diversion. Like Two Nights in Lisbon, they feature his signature elements: complex plotting, brisk pacing, strong female characters, and key details parsed out in tantalizingly small doses.

  “There’s the challenge of holding back information about the protagonist, without being coy or insulting about it,” Pavone observes. “It’s something I struggle with—how to be inside a character’s head, withholding something but not lying to the reader.”

  It’s something I struggle with—how to be inside a character’s head, withholding something but not lying to the reader.

  Will Pavone’s thrillers—which seem ripe for adaptation—ever be translated to film or TV? It’s a question that fans ask him frequently.

  As he explains: since some have overlapping characters, he could only sell the rights to two, The Expats and The Travelers. Both have been in development for years, with the rights currently held by separate streaming services (Paramount+ and Netflix).

  “I don’t hold my breath,” he says with a laugh. “But I hold out hope that one day, I’ll sit somewhere and look at some type of screen, and one of them will be on it.”

• Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More - https://sanmiguelmusesandmagic.com/2024/02/25/lessons-learned-thriller-author-chris-pavone-finds-that-everything-is-material-for-his-next-novel/

  Lessons learned: Thriller author Chris Pavone finds that everything is material for his next novel
  February 25, 2024
  robertjhawkins1
  #smwc24, 9/11, Chris Pavone, John Grisham, Luxembourg, novelist, Pat Conroy, San Miguel Writers Conference, The Expats, The Paris Diversion, Two Nights in Lisbon
  Leave a comment

  For a writer of well-received international mystery thrillers, Chris Pavone can sound hilariously parochial. As a dutiful househusband in Luxembourg — the exact location of which he had to look up on a map — Pavone struggled with the oven dials because they were written in German. (He’d studied French in preparation for the move.)

  A day trip to Germany to buy a clothes dryer for their apartment was a bust. (“We were unprepared for how much German there’d be in Germany …”).

  No matter. After a month of working with a clothesline in the guest bedroom, Pavone discovered that the washing machine was also a dryer. He found out as he was translating the two-dozen settings on the machine. One of them said “Dry.” (What? Not “trocken”?)

  I’m thinking this tale got a pretty good laugh on Friday afternoon at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference where Pavone was the final keynote speaker of the weeklong conference at the HRM hotel.

  I say, “I’m thinking” because I didn’t make it to the talk. Pavone almost didn’t make it either. He had a mean case of laryngitis earlier in the week and so he printed out his speech so that others could deliver it. By Friday, Pavone was well enough to deliver the goods. And I’ve been lucky enough to have been loaned the goods.

  Damn, I wish I’d been there. For an international best-selling thriller writer, he sure can write.

  The speech is nicely structured into three parts, focusing on three of his five novels, and in each, he reviews the bits in his life that lead up to the writing of each.

  The first is, as you may already have guessed from the lead-in, The Expats from 2012, his well-received debut novel. Kate Moore is a stay-at-home mom who has coffee with other moms, drops the kids off at school, and generally struggles with the same exasperations of all highly competent people who are unchallenged. Mind you, this is all taking place in Luxembourg.

  And cheer up, Kate’s secret past as a State Department operative catches up with her — just about the time that she discovers that nothing and nobody around her is as it or they seem. Kind of your classic unraveling of a “deadly conspiracy with immense global implications.” Only done really, really, well.

  Pavone and his family moved to Luxembourg just before he turned 40, after a career in publishing that went from copyeditor to executive editor to deputy publisher in a number of New York publishing houses. In Luxembourg, Pavone’s wife had the job. He got the kids. And “meting out discipline, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, walking the dog … but mostly just parenting, all the goddamned time.

  “I’d been a grown-up with a career, I put on suits and ties and got my shoes shined on the way to the office. I had meetings, I was a New York book editor, and I’d invested a lot of myself into becoming that.

  “Now who was I?”

  No surprise that Pavone nails Kate Moore’s “life of quiet desperation” in The Expats. He was living all the “alienation, the loneliness, the frustrations, the existential angst: ‘Who am I?’ of being a new ex-pat and a stay-at-home parent. He discovered that many of the at-home moms that he hung out with were in similar straits.

  Desperation can be the mother of invention.

  An especially unfriendly — hostile even — woman in a park one day jump-started Pavone’s imagination. Here in Luxembourg, the banking, governmental, and espionage center of the world — “So maybe this woman was a spy? … Maybe her husband was the spy?”

  Ladies and gentlemen, the birth of a spy novel.

  “Most spy novels are, fundamentally, stories about betrayals within intimate relationships,” says Pavone, “with larger than life consequences — prison or freedom, life or death, war or peace. Most domestic suspense is also about betrayals within intimate relationships.

  “I’d long wanted to write a novel,” he added. “And this, I realized, was one I could write: a spy novel that’s also a novel of domestic suspense.”

  A year into life in Luxembourg, Pavone “went straightaway to a cafe with my laptop. I opened a new file, and typed The Expats at the top of the page.”

  The rest is international best-seller history with the much-prized Edgar and Anthony awards attached.

  Kate Moore returns in The Paris Diversion, published seven years later. (In between, Pavone published The Accident and The Travelers.)

  It started out as a 9/11 novel and not just because everyone was writing a 9/11 novel. Pavone lived through the terrorist attack: a front-row seat of every horrific moment from his TriBeCa loft. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the force shook his building. He was evacuated and couldn’t return home for months. That close to Ground Zero.

  The smells. The ruble. The armed soldiers. The people leaping from the towers. The cloud of dust. The chaos. All of it was seared into his brain. Hardwired into his consciousness. “At the time, I didn’t recognize PTSD,” he says.

  Fifteen years later, he went to Paris to write a novel based in Mexico. In 2016. He entered his second world of terror and chaos.

  “France was reeling from a series of brutal terrorist attacks — on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, on the Bataclan nightclub, and just a few weeks earlier on a Bastille Day celebration in Nice that killed nearly 100 people and injured 500 more. In Paris there were soldiers everywhere, bomb-sniffing dogs, a general mood of tension, of fear,” he recalls.

  He adds: “This felt familiar to me. … This, I realized, was my 9/11 novel.”

  “But a novel that uses the threat of terrorism to manipulate perceptions of what’s going on, as real-world terrorism does. To manipulate not only the characters within this book but also manipulate its readers.

  “This novel would be about terrorism used for unexpected goals. Perpetrated by unexpected villains. Villains who look a lot more like the author than anyone else.”

  That Mexican novel would have to wait.

  It took only a few months to write the first draft of The Paris Diversion.

  “But it also took 15 years,” he said.

  And if you think you know what this story is about …

  “You’re wrong.”

  The choice to go into publishing, rather than be a published writer, was a conscious one for Pavone. He knew the “low-odds choice” that writers faced.

  He took the safer road.

  On that road, he met the likes of esteemed authors John Grisham and Pat Conroy and got to work on some of their novels.

  Prior to this, Pavone was a bit of a literary snob — “a young man with a young man’s taste in literature with a capital L — Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer finalists, short stories in magazines that would never dream of hiring me. I didn’t read best sellers.”

  You live. You learn. Especially after editing his share of Grisham blockbusters.

  “Those Grisham thrillers changed the way I looked at commercial fiction, and opened my eyes to the idea of creating suspense against a background of important issues — toxic pollution, the death penalty, big tobacco, sexual assault.”

  He spent a month “helping Pat Conroy bring a novel called Beach Music to the finish line.”

  What a novel that would make: a way overdue novel, a problematic author ensconced in an Upper East Side hotel room rewriting it in longhand, a young buck assigned to babysit the writer and keep him focused until it is finished.

  “That babysitter was me,” recalls Pavone.

  The two of them would take long walks in Central Park. “Pat was a tremendous talker,” recalls Pavone, “but he was also a prodigious listener, constantly quizzing me about my childhood, my life, my everything.”

  Finally, Conroy dropped a gem on the aspiring author: “‘Listen to other people’s stories, Pavone. Listen carefully.'”

  “It turned out that is why he’d been quizzing me,” he said. “Because he’d been working. Because being a novelist isn’t something you only do when you are writing. It is something you do all the time.”

  It is a lesson that has shaped Pavone’s career as an author.

  “Like Pat Conroy advised, I’ve listened to the stories around me, all the time. And because my life has been populated largely by women, theirs are the stories I’ve heard the most, the concerns I’ve cared about the most, the tragedies that have hit me the hardest.

  “Like John Grisham, I’ve tried to set human-level drama against societal-level issues.”

  The third leg on Pavone’s stool is a lifelong love for puzzles. He loves Danielle Trussoni’s new novel, The Puzzle Master. He once edited books of puzzles. The Thursday crossword puzzle in the New York Times is his favorite which contains a “tricky theme within the puzzle.”

  “Those are the novels I try to write,” he said, “with a puzzle within a puzzle, to create a surprising paradigm shift, and ultimately a tremendously satisfying payoff.”

  That said, Pavone’s latest novel Two Nights in Lisbon brings all these lessons and intrigues to the fore. Not surprisingly, Pavone calls it “the best of my five novels.”

  “The initial spark was the Access Hollywood tapes” on which Donald Trump bragged about assaulting women as if it were a sport. Surely, he thought, that was the end of Trump as a politician.

  As we all know, that was not so.

  “I watched in abject horror, as half of America shrugged,” he said.

  “I don’t begrudge anyone their honest political beliefs,” Pavone added. “But surely there’s no pro-rape political party.”

  By the time Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh came along — a “touchy privileged misogynist who’d pretty clearly committed violent sexual felony,” Pavone had sunk “into a funk of despair about what’s wrong with America, about what could be done about it.”

  Kavanaugh got the robe. Pavone got the inspiration for his best novel yet.

  It is a thriller about a woman whose new husband suddenly vanishes but the target could well be the hermetically sealed culture of men who see life and their relationship to women as Trump and Kavanaugh do, through the eyes of a certain kind of sexual privilege.

  “That’s what Two Nights in Lisbon” looks like, at first: a story about an American man who goes missing while on a business trip in Lisbon,” says Pavone. “It’s really a novel about something else entirely.”

  And remember that Mexico novel Pavone set aside to write The Paris Diversion?

  Last week he was in Mexico City and thinking about a CIA novel based in Morocco. Sure. Why not?

  While walking on Paseo de la Reforma, a wide avenue that crosses the heart of Mexico City, Pavone pulled another switcheroo.

  “If anyone has any friends at the embassy (in Mexico City) who are willing to meet with me, please get in touch,” he told the audience.

  He left them with a final bit of literary wisdom: “It all comes from somewhere.”

• BookPage - https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/chris-pavone-interview-two-nights-in-lisbon/

  May 24, 2022
  In Chris Pavone’s new thriller, no one gets a fresh start
  Interview by G. Robert Frazier
  Two Nights in Lisbon dives into challenging topics such as the erosion of truth and the ambient misogyny that haunts women's lives, but don't worry, "This isn't homework."
  Share this Article:

  The characters in Chris Pavone’s thrillers often find themselves trying to bury the past in an effort to begin anew. In his latest novel, Two Nights in Lisbon, Ariel Price thinks she has successfully left her old life behind. But after she wakes up in their Lisbon hotel room to find that her husband has vanished without a trace, she is confronted with all the secrets he was apparently keeping from her. We talked with Pavone about this ongoing theme, his approach to creating characters and his transformation from book editor to novelist.

  What was the initial inspiration for this novel, and why did you choose Lisbon as the setting?
  A few years ago my family spent a handful of nights in Lisbon, in a sun-flooded suite facing a charming square, an absolutely beautiful place to start the day, and I thought: This is almost too perfect, something horrible should happen here. I love novels that seem at first like one type of story, then turn out to be something very different, and I developed a vision of this perfect-looking hotel room as the launching pad for characters who seem extremely lucky but aren’t; for a story that looks romantic then isn’t (but then ultimately is); for a narrative that looks like it’s about a missing man but is about something else entirely.

  The plot of the book began to develop when the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed that Donald Trump seemed to have committed sexual assault regularly, as a sort of hobby. To me this wasn’t a question of politics. I simply could not understand what it was about these sex crimes that made it so easy for people to excuse them as so-called locker room talk, to dismiss them as partisan attacks. I despaired about what was so broken with our society, and what could be done about it.

  “I thought: This is almost too perfect, something horrible should happen here.”

  Anyone who reads one of your books knows that you keep chiseling away at your characters over the course of the story. Two Nights in Lisbon’s Ariel is particularly surprising. Did any of her secrets come as a shock to you?
  I needed to know all of Ariel’s skeletons from the get-go, because her secrets are the underlying framework of the whole story, and their reveals needed to be organized in a way that supported everything else without being coy or blatantly withholding. I think one of the greatest challenges of writing suspense fiction is to withhold in a way that’s not too obvious. If you’re flagrant, it erodes the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief and makes the whole thing feel contrived and the ultimate revelations unearned.

  Ariel often thinks about status signifiers and the way she’s perceived by others. Do you think we worry too much about how people perceive us?
  I’m definitely not qualified to be prescriptive about how all of humanity should behave. But I do wish we could somehow reconsider how we value one another. We heap tremendous rewards on dubious achievements, not to mention things that aren’t achievements at all; being young, rich and beautiful is the opposite of an achievement, it’s just luck. It’s probably unavoidable for most people to envy good fortune, but should we admire it?

  Our culture increasingly celebrates fame for its own sake, completely divorced from any talent or skill or contribution to anything, while at the same time encouraging women to pursue careers in being beautiful, creating a dangerous dynamic of objectification and self-objectification that to me looks both exhausting and terrifying. Just walking down the street, getting a coffee, browsing in a bookstore—you’re always about to be ogled, accosted, propositioned. And that’s not the worst of it. Not by a long shot.

  If you scratch beneath the ticking clock thriller plot of Lisbon, these are some of the themes you’ll find. But you can also just tear through the pages to see what the hell happens. This isn’t homework.

  Read our review of ‘Two Nights in Lisbon’ by Chris Pavone.

  At one point in the novel, Ariel says she and John don’t participate in social media because it’s ruining the world. Do you share her opinion?
  I think social media has made it way too easy—irresistible, for some people—to lie with impunity, to fabricate alternate realities, eroding the very idea of truth. One of the things that seems most broken about America now is that we all exist in hermetically sealed echo chambers, driven largely by social-media feedback loops that reinforce opinions we already have and keep out any evidence to the contrary. A lot of us now refuse to leave our comfort zones altogether, and there are fewer and fewer shared cultural touchstones, less and less agreement on the fundamental facts of the world.

  I think every time someone posts a picture of themselves in a fake private jet, they’re contributing to this insidious erosion of truth, one that’s just as dangerous as a disinformation campaign by a hostile foreign power. We’re losing the capacity to distinguish between truth and lies and, even worse, the ability to care.

  I don’t participate in social media very assiduously. I’m there mainly for videos of dogs, for photos of my friends’ adorable children and to keep in touch with people. I’m pretty sure that I won’t end up on my deathbed wishing I’d been more self-promotional on Instagram.

  “The world doesn’t need more novels. I think what readers truly want are better novels.”

  Two Nights in Lisbon
  As a former book editor, do you find yourself editing your own drafts? What advice do you have for writers who struggle to prioritize production over perfection?
  I edit constantly. I edit every day while I’m writing a first draft; that’s how I start the writing day. After I eventually type “the end,” I spend more time editing and revising subsequent drafts than I did writing the first.

  I don’t accept the idea that writers should prioritize production over perfection. The world doesn’t need more novels. I think what readers truly want are better novels. Or at least that’s what I want—not more choices but better choices. This isn’t journalism, and there’s no clock on it. The crucial thing is to write a great novel, not just to write a novel.

  People like to throw around the advice that while you can edit a bad page, you can’t edit a blank page. Maybe so. But that philosophy only works if you do the necessary editing of the bad pages. It’s very hard to kill your darlings, especially for writers who don’t have a lot of experience with rigorous, ruthless editing.

  With five books under your belt, would you say that your transition from editor to writer is complete, or are you still learning things? What’s something you wish you’d realized earlier on?
  I’ve now been a full-time writer for a decade and a half, and it still feels largely new to me. I’ve accepted that imposter syndrome might be permanent. It seems so unlikely that I’m allowed to earn my living by sitting around and writing made-up stories; sometimes it seems impossible that anyone could be this lucky.

  I wished I’d realized earlier how much revising I’d do, on everything. For my first couple of books, all this work felt sometimes like failure. Why do I have to keep fixing this goddamned manuscript? I thought I was doing something wrong, and I hoped that next time I’d nail the novel on the first draft, or even second. But revisions are apparently a big part of how I work. I can’t see what’s missing from a manuscript and which aspects could be much better until I get to the end and look back. I no longer think of this as a problem that I need to fix; it’s the way this process works for me, and it’s a luxury that I’m thankful to indulge.

  “I’ve accepted that imposter syndrome might be permanent.”

  Ariel says she wants to be a person without fear. What are you afraid of, and have you conquered those fears?
  A novel is a very personal piece of creativity. It’s your voice, your worldview, your whole personality on the page, and publication is opening up that personality not only to reasonable professional criticism but also to deeply personal and sometimes irrational attacks, even the vitriolic hatred of strangers. (Thanks again, social media!) It’s a little bit like going to a giant party filled with everyone you’ve ever met, then having those people write reviews of you to be posted on the internet for everyone to see.

  I used to be afraid of being hated, as both a real person in the real world and also as a writer of made-up stories. But I’ve accepted that there are many people out there with whom I disagree about nearly everything, so it makes sense that I’ll disagree with their judgment of my book, too, not to mention their judgment of me. I still don’t enjoy being hated, and I hope I never do. But I’m not afraid of it anymore.

  What’s the next step in the evolution of Chris Pavone? Where do you go from here?
  My twins are about to graduate from high school and go off to college, ending this long stage when parenting has been the organizing principle of my life. This makes me both ecstatic and morose, every single day. I have no idea where I go from here.

• Northforker - https://northforker.com/2025/05/orient-author-chris-pavone-drops-summer-must-read-the-doorman/

  Orient author Chris Pavone drops summer must-read ‘The Doorman’
  by Lauren Parker on May 20th, 2025
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  Alexis Meadows

  Chris Pavone’s “The Doorman” hits shelves today. (Photo credit: Sam Macintosh)

  Award-winning novelist Chris Pavone has been transporting readers around the globe with his jet-setting thrillers Two Nights in Lisbon, The Paris Diversion, The Travelers, The Accident and The Expats. In The Doorman, launching May 20, readers stay firmly planted in New York City, but soon realize that the city’s multi-layered social hierarchies are truly worlds apart.

  Northforker sat down with Pavone, who splits his time between Manhattan and Orient, to learn what drove the writing of this social satire with a dash of thriller page-turner, and why it’s being called a Bonfire of the Vanities of its time.

  “The Doorman” by Chris Pavone. (Jacket image courtesy of Macmillan Publishers)
  Northforker: This book feels different from your others in both pacing and plot. What’s the overarching story and what prompted you to tackle such sweeping topics as race, class and ambition?

  Ocean Electric
  Chris Pavone: I’ve always loved New York novels—Invisible Man and [author] John Dos Passos, Bright Lights Big City and Jazz , Jonathan Letham and Richard Price, Pineapple Street. In the best of these books, the city isn’t merely a setting, it’s a confluence of themes—race and class and money, art and commerce, ambition and crime, sex of course, and the thing that New York City people love to talk about above all other subjects: real estate.

  A few years ago my family moved into a fancy apartment house on Central Park West, where I got to know some of the doormen, and one guy in particular who spent his entire working life in this one job, at this one place, until just a couple of days before he died. He and I lived very different lives, but we converged in a place and time where one of us worked, and one of us lived. That was something I wanted to explore, in the context of many different types of conflict—marital conflict, moral conflict, mortal conflict.

  NF: Bonfire of the Vanities, set in the ’80s, was also a scathing look at social strata in New York City. Fast forward to 2025. What’s different now, if anything? Why is today’s climate ripe for The Doorman?

  CP: Back in the 1980s, we may have disagreed about the viability of trickle-down economics, or the wisdom of arms-racing the Soviet Union to death, but we did agree on the fundamental facts of the world, as presented to us every evening by the network news. Today, the media are so fractured that they seem to occupy completely different realities, which I think has caused us to hate each other a lot more than we used to, even among people who agree on 99 percent of everything. We’re now much more sensitive to our physical identities—racial identities, gender identities, sexual identities—but I think much less attuned to our class identities, to our shared interests. It’s no longer easy to answer the question of what it means to be liberal, conservative, democrat, republican. Who gets to decide?

  FD Building Co.
  The Doorman tackles all these issues in the background. But in the foreground it’s a suspense novel that takes place almost entirely in one tense, fraught, perilous and ultimately fatal day and night, in a microcosm of the conflicts that permeate America at this moment.

  NF: No one was spared in the details and social commentary. Did you have fun creating all these character studies?

  CP: Bonfire of the Vanities was a spectacularly entertaining novel that skewered everyone, but some of it doesn’t hold up all that well—it’s a book about racism that is, arguably, pretty racist itself. I wanted to write a similar type of suspense novel that’s more attuned to today’s sensitivities, while also being a book about those sensitivities, or over-sensitivities, a lot of which are vested in The Doorman’s minor characters. I really love the three main characters, I love their relationships, I love their problems, I love their failings, I love the momentous choices they make at the end of their intertwined stories.

  NF: You grew up in Brooklyn and now live in Manhattan. Were you always intrigued by apartment microcosms and the Upstairs/Downstairs secrets of inhabitants and staff?

  FD Building Co.
  CP: I’ve always been intrigued—astounded—by everything about New York City. Look around any crowded subway car, it’s a miracle of diversity. This is one of the defining traits of big cities in general, and of New York in particular, all of us thrown together—religions, ethnicities, ages, economics, professions, sexualities. In fiction, this creates opportunities to explore the ways in which our humanities overlap, and diverge, and that’s how I hope everyone reads the novel. That’s how I hope everyone reads every novel; that’s what novels are for.

  NF: As a New Yorker, how much of your lived experience comes through to your characters? (i.e. riding the subway in a tux)?

  CP: One of the characters in The Doorman travels by subway or bus whenever he puts on a tuxedo, and so does the book’s author; it makes me feel less like a jackass than being driven around in a black car in black tie. This same fictional character also suffers from many of the same complaints—physical, metaphysical, existential—that I do, while living in a similar apartment to mine, in a similar building. This character is definitely not me, he isn’t based on me, but all my characters—men, women, major characters, minor—have little bits of me in them — especially my worst attributes! — as well as bits of of real-life stories I’ve heard, of conversations I’ve overheard.

  NF: Where do you like to write when you’re here on the North Fork?

  Mermaid Water Solutions
  CP: I often write on my front porch, watching the world go by; I’ve discovered that I need the occasional distraction in order to concentrate. Or under the attic eaves, where my desk sits in a window with views of the water. I also like to get away from the house to work, mostly at Aldo’s in Greenport, but my favorite spot is the wharf in Orient, on a nice day in summertime, during the kids’ sailing program. There’s not much in the world that’s cuter than a flock of little 8-year-olds setting out into the harbor in their little boats. For a decade I spent all summer every summer with my kids on the North Fork—playing baseball, beach walks with the dog, cooking for the various small people who made their way to my house at mealtimes. But my children are in college now. I miss them, and I miss that summer life. It’s something that looks like it’s going to last forever, then one year it just ends, forever.

  NF: Any North Fork spots you love to frequent for inspiration or just to unwind in general?

  CP: Orient is magical. I feel myself unwind even as I’m still driving east over the causeway, with the Sound on one side and Orient Harbor on the other, Bird’s Eye hill rising to the left and the village’s shoreline spreading out on the right, the egrets stalking in the water and the ospreys lurking above—it’s a vista that’s stunning in every weather, in every season, like living in a national park that’s also filled with beautiful houses and people I love and great food.

  NF: Any plans for a Chris Pavone thriller set on the North Fork? Or the East End in general?

  Northwell Peconic Bay Medical Center
  CP: There are already scenes in two of my novels that are set on the East End, both forks. My grandparents had a house in Cutchogue, and I’ve been spending time here in seven different decades. The North Fork has changed immensely during those years, and I have an idea for a suspense story that takes place entirely in a village here, exploring the tensions of the evolution.

  Chris Pavone’s “The Doorman” is available for sale at Burton’s Books (43 Front St., Greenport, 631-477-1161), where he will be doing a reading and signing on May 31, as well as at these local spots: Saturday, June 7 at the Shelter Island Public Library (37 N. Ferry Road, Shelter Island, 631-749-0042); Friday, July 18 at the Hampton Library (2478 Main Road, Bridgehampton, 631-537-0015); and Friday, Aug. 9 at the East Hampton Library’s Author’s Night.

Pavone, Chris. The Accident. Crown. Mar. 2014. 336p. ISBN 9780385348454. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780385348461. F

Pavone's second novel (after his Edgar Award-winning thriller The Expats) follows several people in the publishing industry as they handle a manuscript that promises tremendous personal gain but, as some soon learn, at risk of death. Isabel Reed, a divorced literary agent, has received a manuscript that promises to be a blockbuster. If true, the book will destroy the career of wealthy media mogul Charles Wolfe, about to launch a political career. He is prepared to have his henchman, Berlin cultural attache and rogue CIA agent Hayden Gray, kill anyone who gets in his way. Jeff Fielder, also divorced and long enamored of Isabel, is an editor in need of a career-changing book. His boss, deeply in debt, faces a buyout by Wolfe's company. A subsidiary fights director has stolen a copy of the manuscript and heads to Hollywood with visions of grandeur. All are in great danger, not to mention the anonymous author, who may have to "die" twice to survive! VERDICT Fans of popular fiction (not just thriller lovers) and "all those interested in the inner workings of the publishing world will have a terrific time reading this engaging thriller, driven by compelling portraits of desperate characters, each of whom will come to wonder if the manuscript in hand is worth the cost; [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/13.]--Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Terpening, Ron

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Terpening, Ron. "Pavone, Chris. The Accident." Library Journal, vol. 138, no. 20, 1 Dec. 2013, pp. 91+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A353437610/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f54d3611. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Pavone, Chris THE ACCIDENT Crown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 4 ISBN: 978-0-385-34845-4

Pavone follows up his best-selling novel, The Expats (2012), with another thriller featuring some of the same characters. The action here involves a manuscript entitled The Accident, which threatens to bring down a media empire owned by Charlie Wolfe, who now aspires to a political career. While in college, Charlie had a night of drunken revelry, and he and his friend Dave, the sober designated driver, had an accident involving the death of a girl, one that implicated Charlie. Preston Wolfe, Charlie's powerful father and a former deputy director of the CIA, covered up the accident and for 25 years paid Dave off to keep his mouth shut. Although, over the years, Dave earned a cool $1 million from this deal, he began to feel guilty and so wrote the explosive manuscript. Charlie suspects that Dave's manuscript is in part a conspiracy to create a scandal and bring down the share prices for the Wolfe empire, bankrupting Wolfe and also creating a larger circle of scandal involving murky political doings over the course of Charlie's career. Frightened for his life and knowing that Charlie wants to hunt him down, Dave fakes his own suicide and changes his identity. Meanwhile, literary agent Isabel Reed recognizes the volatility of what Dave has written and is extremely careful with the manuscript, but despite her best efforts, a few more hard copies start to circulate. One is with Jeffrey Fielder, an editor and Isabel's best friend, and another is briefly "borrowed" from Fielder's desk, copied and then shopped for movie rights by sexy Camilla Glyndon-Browning. Almost everyone physically connected with the manuscript starts getting killed in Charlie's desperate attempt to quash this expos� of his past. Pavone knows the formula for a best-seller and keeps the reader turning the pages.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Pavone, Chris: THE ACCIDENT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A352605683/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7204e7df. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

* The Accident. By Chris Pavone. Mar. 2014. 336p. Crown, $26 (9780385348454).

New York literary agent Isabel Reed plows through an anonymous manuscript in one night and immediately knows two things: The manuscript, a biography of a media mogul, will be a blockbuster, and people will die if word of its existence leaks. She's also fairly sure she knows who the author is, but he's dead. Word does leak, in New York and Hollywood, and ambitious young women in publishing quickly die violently. Isabel and her chosen editor, Jeffrey Fielder, are on the run from resourceful, relentless killers. Pavone's plot twists tirelessly, shifting focus among a large cast of well-drawn characters and using flashbacks and changes of locale (Copenhagen, Zurich, Manhattan, Hollywood, the Hamptons) to build suspense. The Accident is a somewhat more conventional thriller than Pavone's fine debut (The Expats, 2012), but he excels at developing characters' backstories. Isabel and Jeffrey, for example, are successful but frightened that changes in their business and the onset of middle age might make them has-beens, and they're both recalling the mutual attraction they once had but didn't act on. Like Isabel, many readers will read this one through the night.--Thomas Gaughan

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Gaughan, Thomas. "The Accident." Booklist, vol. 110, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2014, p. 48. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A357147544/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a546c44a. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

THE ACCIDENT

By Chris Pavone

385 pages. Crown Publishers. $26.

Chris Pavone managed to turn his experience in book editing and living in Luxembourg into an Edgar-winning spy novel, ''The Expats.'' With ''The Accident,'' he matches that first novel's nail-biting level of excitement while continuing to write about what he knows. ''The Accident'' is a thriller about publishing, and if that sounds like an oxymoron, Mr. Pavone is very good at rendering it wildly dramatic. He's also good at diverting close scrutiny about where any holes in his story may be. He just keeps the shocks coming and leaves the head scratching for later.

Just take it for granted that ''The Accident'' is about a manuscript so earth-shattering that people in the publishing world would kill to get their hands on it. Mr. Pavone's first deft move is to steer the red-hot manuscript, a biography, toward Isabel Reed, the glamorous New York literary agent who is the natural choice for dealing with a book of potentially nuclear impact. Isabel is renowned for her discretion. She knows how delicately the book needs to be handled.

It's not really her fault that the younger people who work for her aren't as smart. Or that they haven't learned not to blab drunkenly to their friends over dinner, tweet or post items on Facebook when a manuscript that's really aces comes along.

So while Isabel begins pitching ''the biggest bombshell you'll ever read,'' to the best editor she knows, the manuscript, also called ''The Accident,'' has already gone into covert circulation. It has even been photocopied by someone hoping to sell it in Hollywood. This means great danger to anyone (like that tweeting assistant) who has come in contact with it, let alone Isabel herself. Mr. Pavone is much too smart to make this a mere lady-in-danger tale.

He lards this book with keen, bittersweet observations about the publishing world, details that become a big, poignant part of its appeal. He is clearly familiar with the trajectory of publishing careers, starting with the early years in which the word ''career'' doesn't even register.

He also knows what happens to those who reach the age of Isabel's cohort (mid-40s), when people seem only as hot as their last success and that much more desperate for the next one. Even if ''The Accident'' were a cookbook, he suggests, the fight for it would be fierce, if its commercial prospects were strong; the days of publishing as a courtly business are as long gone as they are in some forms of journalism. All of which brings us to Charlie Wolfe, the man who is the subject of the manuscript.

We can assume this much about Charlie going in: If Mr. Pavone knew how to write an eight-figure blockbuster about even an imaginary media mogul, he would have. Instead, he has to come up with fleeting hints of a humongous horror about Charlie, who has made a career of eating scandal for breakfast. Charlie is the octopus of the Internet, the guy whose Wolfe Worldwide Media has done its best ''to de-news the news, to legitimize sensationalism.''

His conglomerate has edged out professional news gatherers in favor of ''amateurs who had no legal relationship or responsibility to the publishers, with a content bias toward gossip and innuendo, voyeurism and scandal, openly espousing unabashedly partisan rhetoric.'' So what's the big news about Charlie Wolfe? What kind of headline could possibly hurt a man like this?

While offering brief glimpses of the manuscript, Mr. Pavone tries the grand diversionary tactic of taking his story global -- and bringing back Kate Moore of ''The Expats,'' who does a great imitation of a bored housewife while secretly engaging in deadly black ops that somehow do nothing to blow her cover as an ordinary wife and mom.

Yes, the manuscript is that important: Global forces are at work trying to stop it, or alter it, or ... we don't know yet. Then there's the personage referred to as ''the author,'' the manuscript's writer who drops out of American life early in the book by faking his own death, only to reappear alive and well in Zurich, waiting for his little game to play out. You will want to finish Mr. Pavone's ''The Accident'' at a nice, rapid clip to see how these pieces come together.

So the only problem with all this is the ''Accident'' manuscript, the book within Mr. Pavone's book. The sad fact is that it's easier for Mr. Pavone to come up with shocking dramatic turns, great yelp-worthy moments, abrupt killings, unexpected connections (a beaut waits at the end of the book) and ingenious sabotage than it is for him to come up with anything truly damning about Charlie. Evil deeds just ain't what they used to be.

Call Mr. Pavone a reliable new must-read in the world of thrillers, but don't call him an optimist. He sees book publishing going down the tubes even faster than the moral quandaries of early-20th-century American fiction have. (How long would the anguished hero of ''An American Tragedy'' have suffered over drowning the pregnant girlfriend who kept him from marrying his dream girl if that story were set today?)

One character in ''The Accident'' began as a receptionist at a literary agency, fully believing she would work her way up through the ranks. ''But then that big bully of a beast rose up and ate her profession,'' Mr. Pavone writes. ''First the web devoured book clubs, then magazines, and now its maw is agape, ravenous, ready to swallow the whole bloody publishing business.'' Luckily, unputdownable books like Mr. Pavone's help keep the business alive and well.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: Chris Pavone, whose novel ''The Expats'' won an Edgar Award. (PHOTOGRAPH BY NINA SUBIN)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
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Maslin, Janet. "Amid the slush piles and proofs lurks a page-turner with a dirty secret." New York Times, 6 Mar. 2014, p. C4(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A360634915/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3316c08b. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Pavone, Chris. The Travelers. Crown. Mar. 2016. 448p. ISBN 9780385348485. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780385348492. F

Pavone's thrilling new novel opens with a pulse-pounding scene and never lets up. Will Rhodes is a travel writer, working for a high-profile magazine with field offices all over the world. While navigating the communication minefields of an increasingly tense marriage and a bleak personal financial situation, Will takes on an assignment to write about the expat life abroad. In Argentina, he is faced with temptations he cannot resist, and what follows is a complication that turns his life upside down and inside out. Running the genre gamut from espionage novel to action/adventure to investigatory mystery, this tightly woven thriller is smart, sharp, and packed with nonstop exploits. VERDICT The best-selling author of The Expats and The Accident excels at suspense and action, penning the perfect balance of tautness and complexity to keep the story moving forward at a breakneck pace. Spy/thriller aficionados as well as literary fiction readers who like dipping into well-spun commercial fare will add this title to their library holds list. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/15.]--Julie Kane, Washington & Lee Lib., Lexington, VA

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Kane, Julie. "Pavone, Chris. The Travelers." Library Journal, vol. 141, no. 2, 1 Feb. 2016, p. 73. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A441402056/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a3ed3a90. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Byline: Gerald Bartell

On a flight to Paris, travel writer Will Rhodes's plane nearly plummets. After it stabilizes, Will downs some sleeping pills with a whiskey. The brush with death sparks a revelation: "He should be happy, but he's not." He's made "the relentless pursuit of happiness his career." But the reality says otherwise. Will's marriage and finances are faltering. And by the way, the affair he had while on assignment in Argentina was caught on tape.

Also, the woman he slept with says she's a CIA agent. She makes an offer he can't refuse: "'You'll become an asset of the CIA, Will Rhodes. Or we'll ruin your life.'"

So Will becomes a spy. For a New York magazine writer, this is an adjustment, to put it mildly. Things get even more complicated when he realizes that his clandestine work involves more than ferrying information: He might have to kill -- or be killed. Now Will wants out. Trying to break free, though, puts him in peril. Too many people know Will is a man who knows too much.

Chris Pavone's "The Travelers" is a Hitchcockian thriller that recalls "Notorious" (spying for the government; explosive marital secrets) and "North by Northwest" (man on the run). The book is filled with characters clutching passports (fake and genuine) as they messenger envelopes stamped "confidential," upload and download secret files, haunt hidden rooms, and, literally, hang from cliffs -- all the while sprinting from New York to Paris to Buenos Aires and, ultimately, to the Snaefellsnes Peninsula in Iceland.

After the success of his two thrillers, "The Expats" and "The Accident," Pavone works here in an expansive mode. He brings on a full slate of characters, sharply etching their dress, their moves, their motives, all the while evoking the world they occupy. The book has, not surprisingly, been optioned for film.

At the magazine, there is editor Malcolm Somers, whose furtive activities include something shady with Will's wife. There's a former editor who disappeared, who may have been a victim of suicide or murder. There's a man hiding out in Stockholm. There's a shady group in Falls Church, Va., monitoring the moves of "a strange combination of people," including some of the staff at Travelers.

All of them inhabit what Pavone effectively renders as a murky, Kafkaesque world. Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas becomes "a performance-art exhibit of lonely late-night labor, aproned cleaning ladies pushing vacuum cleaners, and jumpsuited maintenance men on ladders, and bankers at desks with sentient-looking Equipoise lamps, takeout containers and partially crumpled cans of Diet Coke that didn't quite make it to the trash bin, all of it a silent pantomime of isolation and alienation."

Such ruminations add breadth and depth to "The Travelers" but also slow its pace. By midpoint, the reader may want to get on with the chase. In the book's final third, Pavone does just that, deftly pulling together the plot's many threads, connecting characters that seemed unrelated to the plot and stepping up the tempo. An action scene in Iceland caps "The Travelers" with a breakneck finish.

Exhausted by dizzying reversals and athletic pursuits that would tax a triathlete, Will wonders at the end whether he ever really knew his friends, co-workers and partners -- "all of us travelers," he observes, "all on our way to someplace else." There are hints he'll return in future installments to find out. Let's hope so.

Gerald Bartellis an arts writer based in Manhattan.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
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Bartell, Gerald. "'The Travelers' review: A Hitchcockian thriller about a reluctant spy." Washingtonpost.com, 4 Mar. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A447802230/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5c3cf19a. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

There are two kinds of spy-hopping in ''The Travelers,'' Chris Pavone's third and most furiously peripatetic novel. The first is what an inquisitive whale does when it shoots its head above water. The second is what this espionage novel does when it jumps from Paris to London; the Gulf of Maine to Husavik, Iceland, in the space of three pages; then back to Paris, Husavik and New York City shortly thereafter. Mr. Pavone keeps his readers' heads spinning and his main character, the travel writer Will Rhodes, on the run.

This author's sly debut, ''The Expats,'' was more notable for suspense and sub rosa ingenuity than for wall-to-wall action. His second, ''The Accident,'' turned up the heat. With an insider's knowledge of publishing -- he worked as an editor before turning to novels of intrigue -- Mr. Pavone wrote about an editor who landed the hottest unpublished tell-all manuscript in world history. Plausibility was a slight problem, but excitement was not. You barely caught your breath for long enough to wonder what kind of tell-all could live up to that hype.

Now he has raised the ante again. Even the prologue to ''The Travelers'' is frenzied. It has Will Rhodes waking up in a hotel room in Mendoza, Argentina, at 2:50 a.m. A menacing male intruder is in his room, wielding ... a smartphone? The phone plays a quick clip of a sex scene. Then the woman from the clip materializes for just long enough to clobber Will with a right hook and leave him unconscious. And we're off to the races.

What was all that about? Will lives with his wife, Chloe, in New York and works as a correspondent for Travelers magazine. This seems like an ordinary job. (''So tell me, Rhodes -- are you ever going to turn in that sidebar on the Swiss Alps?'') But it isn't. When Will makes one of his frequent trips to the airport, he is jokingly called 007 by the check-in guy, Reggie. He ''likes to kid that Will isn't a writer, he's a spy; that his magazine is just a cover,'' Mr. Pavone writes. ''Over the years, Reggie hasn't been the only person to make this tongue-in-cheek accusation.''

Not-exactly-spoiler alert: Reggie's a smart guy.

And so is Will, or else he'd be dead before ''The Travelers'' got very far. The book keeps him on the run through countless efforts to recruit, frame, manipulate, trick and kill him. Readers have to be willing to believe that Will Rhodes is worth all this effort and scheming, even though he is no 007 and has no clandestine duties. Nor does he know about anyone else's. Mr. Pavone carefully withholds any explanation for the morass that surrounds Will until very late in the game. And this author is so crafty about diversionary tactics that he gives readers no time to wonder what the hot pursuits are really about.

Some of those tactics involve Chloe. Early in the story, while Will is off getting himself permanently compromised and ripe for blackmail in Argentina, Chloe begins pursuing her own furtive career. Some of the people in this book turn out to have espionage connections, but Mr. Pavone would never dream of keeping things that simple: The reader must also sort out the real agents from the impostors. Will has the same problem, but in his case, the stakes are considerably higher. He's never sure which, if not all, of these contingents want to use him and then get rid of him.

It's not easy for a writer to maintain the intense kinetic energy that runs throughout ''The Travelers.'' It may not be entirely well advised, either. The pacing is so relentless that it feels unmodulated; Mr. Pavone's other protagonists were given more down time to calculate and assess their situations than Will has. He is constantly driven by serial emergencies, to the point where a huge action scene involves a knife, a crossbow, explosives, a ringing telephone and a cliff, off which at least one character falls. The characters' thinking? Strictly tactical. The conversation? Just taunts.

Granted, this is no moment for small talk. But the small details in Mr. Pavone's work are always welcome. Connoisseurs of such stuff should enjoy the book's 18-point list of instructions for the woman who'd like to lure a man to a romantic terrace restaurant, stab him with a switchblade and push him off a cliff.

There's room for a lot more of this than the book includes. It's gratifying to find Will casually noticing a man's watch and later realizing that it belies something important about the man's supposed identity. It's nice to find that Malcolm Somers, the man who edits The Traveler and has other, more secretive business to attend to, knows exactly what to pick up at a service station while being tailed by hostile strangers. Why buy coffee when he can leave them with flat tires on their cars?

''The Travelers'' does confirm what Mr. Pavone's first two books have established: that when it comes to quick-witted, breathless thrillers that trot the globe, his are top-tier. But if he chooses to let the next one breathe more deeply, that would work, too.

The Travelers

By Chris Pavone

433 pages. Crown Publishers. $27.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: PHOTO (C1); PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY NINA SUBIN) (C6)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
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Maslin, Janet. "Danger in Every Destination for a Peripatetic Travel Writer." New York Times, 16 Mar. 2016, p. C1(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A446391039/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=911d6ca6. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Pavone, Chris THE PARIS DIVERSION Crown (Adult Fiction) $27.00 5, 7 ISBN: 978-1-5247-6150-9

"It is a dangerous time to be alive." Indeed, as this fast-paced thriller by seasoned mysterian Pavone (The Travelers, 2016, etc.) proves.

A siren wails in Paris, a once-rare sound often heard in these times of terror. It's gone off because a jihadi has strapped a bomb to himself and is standing in front of the Louvre, "in the epicenter of Western civilization," waiting for his moment. But is he a jihadi? Who's put him up to this dastardly deed, and why? That's for Kate Moore, deep-cover CIA agent, "sidewalk-swimming in a sea of expat moms," to suss out. Kate lives in a shadow world, so hidden away that even her hedge-fund-master husband doesn't have a clue about what she does: "Dexter has been forced to accept that she's entitled to her secrets," Pavone writes, adding, "He's had plenty of his own." Indeed, and in the shadowy parallel world of speculative finance, he's teamed up with a fast-living entrepreneur who wants nothing more than to become superrich and run off with his "assistant-concubine." Hunter Forsyth is about to announce a huge deal, but suddenly he's disappeared, whisked away by shadowy people who, by the thin strings of suspense, have something to do with that bomb across town. So does a vengeful young mom, strapped to a useless husband and bent on payback for a long-ago slight. All this is red meat to Kate, who's tired of the domestic life, no matter how much a sham, and is happier than a clam when "running her network of journalists, bloggers, influencers, as well as drug dealers, thieves, prostitutes, and cops, plus diplomats and soldiers, maitre d's and concierges and bartenders and shopkeepers." With all those players, mercenaries, and assorted bad guys thrown into the mix, you just know that the storyline is going to be knotty, and it resolves in a messy spatter of violence that's trademark Pavone and decidedly not for the squeamish.

A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carre, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Pavone, Chris: THE PARIS DIVERSION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A575952267/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bf2e0b22. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

The Paris Diversion. By Chris Pavone. May 2019. 384p. Crown, $27 (9781524761509).

Pavone delivers another thoroughly immersive, stylish, and intelligent thriller (following The Travelers, 2016). In a move that is sure to please fans of The Expats (2012), he returns here to the lives of Kate and Dexter Moore, now living in Paris after former CIA agent Kate managed to extract her cy the levels of deception keep multiplying. It starts with a terrorist in front of the Louvre holding a dirty bomb. As the standoff continues, Kate, who is back with the agency in a shady, off-the-books capacity, starts digging into what's going on, hoping to solidify her position with her superiors, and soon discovers that Dexter may be fiddling on the fringes of cybercrime again, out to profit from the downfall of an arrogant financier. And what's with Julia and Bill turning up in Paris, seem ingly ready to bury the hatchet? But burying it where? Yes, Pavone keeps us zooming through this book to find the answers to those and many other questions, but, in the middle of that race to the finish line, most readers are likely to find themselves slowing down a bit, savoring the richness of virtually every character who flashes by and especially taking time to contemplate Kate, who just may be the most fascinating, believably human fictional spy to appear since George Smiley shuffled his bedraggled self onto the stage nearly 60 years ago.--Bill Ott

[HD] HIGH DEMAND BACKSTORY: Like Louise Penny, Pavone is the kind of thriller writer who can cut a wide swath into multiple audiences, from genre fans to more-literary readers.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
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Ott, Bill. "The Paris Diversion." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 17, 1 May 2019, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587366672/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e53b5c4c. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Debuts as sexy as Chris Pavone's ''The Expats'' (2012) are rare. Pavone had previously worked in cookbook publishing. When that career became a fallen souffle, he accompanied his wife and young sons to Luxembourg, which became the intriguingly offbeat setting for his first novel, an uncommonly devious espionage thriller.

Luxembourg was just unfamiliar enough to lend an air of suspicion to the supposedly blah activities in which Pavone's ''expats'' engaged. Relocated from Washington, D.C., they were Dexter Moore, who did something vague involving computer technology, and his wife, Kate, who had worked for the State Department. Kate was now a bored housewife, except that she was really a spy.

Now, in his fourth novel, ''The Paris Diversion,'' Pavone has decided to make ''The Expats'' a series, Kate its heroine and Paris its latest setting. If this sounds abrupt, it should. He has laid only the flimsiest groundwork for such a drastic swivel. ''The Expats'' was so intricate that it is essential to read it before tackling the sequel. If you pick up ''The Paris Diversion'' cold, you'll spend a lot of time wondering who the Moores are, what happened to them in Luxembourg (not to mention what happened during Kate's long career in espionage before she married Dexter) and what residue of problems and enemies are brought to this touristy new book.

''The Paris Diversion'' provides an unearned frisson from the fact that its sections are named for Paris's most famous places, with accompanying photos. One, of course, is Notre-Dame, pictured here in all its undamaged glory and used by Pavone in the most gimmicky way. The Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Elysees and the Louvre provide other picture-postcard backdrops for the book's plot. There are also visits to Venice and an aerial view of the Matterhorn. If you're the kind of reader who thinks such touches need justification, this book is not for you.

With its events confined to the space of a single business day, the book stages a couple of horrendous crises. First, there is a multi-phased terrorist takeover of the plaza outside the Louvre, which leaves tourists running and screaming, with a stereotypically Islamic-looking man standing alone in the vast space with a stereotypical suitcase bomb chained to his wrist. Without spoilers it is impossible to offer an appraisal of the way this tactic is used -- by the characters and, more important, by the author.

Second, there are the smooth moves by which an arrogant C.E.O. and his too-beautiful young assistant are whisked out of their office and off to a secure location -- on the very day that the C.E.O.'s company stands to generate a great deal of money for its investors. A lot is riding on the pair's whereabouts. Yet hours pass and they are not heard from ... and there had better be something really major going on here, hadn't there? The idea that the key word in ''The Paris Diversion'' is ''diversion,'' and that we are being put through something very petty, is just unthinkable.

''The Paris Diversion'' does have a tight, extremely clever bit of exposition, in which all its diverse pieces suddenly fall into place and its many red herrings are exposed as empty trickery. But it comes much too late to compensate for the fact that Pavone has given readers an elaborate house of cards, not a scheme built on anything substantial.

Dexter doesn't loom that large in the book's machinations. But Kate must carry most of it on her duplicitous shoulders. She stays active, and uses up a lot of verbs in the process. She scouts, sizes up, remembers, secures (her job, which has been in peril), rushes toward (a bomb everyone else in Paris is fleeing), realizes, foils, avenges and otherwise stays astonishingly busy. If only the book could match her energy level.

Pavone can do so much more with her. He has been well worth reading since ''The Expats,'' through both ''The Accident'' (2014) and ''The Travelers'' (2016), because of his exceptional plotting and pacing. This is his first eyebrow-raiser. Building a series around Kate Moore seems like a fine idea. She started out as a skilled professional, and Pavone began by winning an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. But he and Kate need to do more than blow smoke.

The Paris DiversionBy Chris Pavone373 pages. Crown. $27.

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Maslin, Janet. "In the Sequel to 'The Expats,' a Spy Stumbles." New York Times, 2 May 2019, p. C7(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A584156976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=60a35787. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Byline: Carol Memmott

In one of many can't-look-away scenes in "The Paris Diversion," a man wearing a suicide vest stops walking through the courtyard of the Louvre when he spots 100 schoolchildren enjoying a day trip. Is this where he'll detonate the vest? Does the suitcase he carries hold a dirty bomb that could spread radiation throughout the museum?

Scenes like this are ubiquitous in thrillers written since 9/11, and Chris Pavone takes advantage of what we now call the new normal in his multilayered fourth novel. The book refers back to his blockbuster 2012 debut, "The Expats," a much-talked-about novel of international intrigue and an imploding marriage. But you need not have read "The Expats" to be immediately captivated by "The Paris Diversion."

Kate Moore, the American at the center of the "The Expats," is now living in Paris with her husband, Dexter, and their two young sons. If you don't know Kate from reading "The Expats," you probably know women like her. She wants it all but can't find a balance. She'd gone from being a Langley analyst/intelligence agent/assassin to a stay-at-home mom, and she was miserable. It all changes when she discovers that Dexter has moved the family to Europe so he can steal 500 million euros through a cyberhack. She comes back to life mopping up his mess, and for reasons we'll leave unexplained she's now running an off-the-books CIA substation in "The Paris Diversion."

Kate believed she could start over in Paris but realizes she's been fooled "by the delusional charade that she could have everything, that maybe she even deserves everything." Like "The Expats," "The Paris Diversion" is as much the story of a modern woman as it is a globe-hopping thriller. Which leads us back to the suicide bomber. When go-getter Kate hears about the situation at the Louvre, she rushes to the scene thinking she can effect an outcome that will benefit her career. She's not happy, but she's practical.

On the same day, in another part of Paris, American billionaire Hunter Forsyth goes missing hours before he's due to make a major announcement that will make him richer. When Kate discovers he's a man despised by Dexter, she worries that maybe Dexter is somehow part of the possible kidnapping. And could the missing CEO and the threat to the Louvre and a handful of other high-value targets in Paris be linked? If all this sounds outrageously over-the-top, well, it is. But it worked in "The Expats," and it works here, as well. Kate will get to the bottom of it.

The outrageous plot and equally crazy subplots unravel in just one day in Paris. Readers may be scratching their heads as the story's timeline zips from past to present and location to location with no warning and from one slow-to-be-identified character to another. Eventually it melds together.

With the deft hand of someone who understands what drives people to make bad decisions, Pavone delivers mostly selfish and shallow characters who both fascinate and repulse us. Perhaps the only person we feel sorry for is the man in the suicide vest. To reveal any more about other characters or plot points would amount to an avalanche of spoilers, but the novel's message is clear: There's nothing people won't do for money. When the novel's diversion is revealed, you'll understand why Pavone prefaced his novel with a quote from Harry Houdini: "What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes." It may be the most clever plot twist of the year.

Carol Memmott, a freelance book critic, lives in Northern Virginia.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Washington Post
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Memmott, Carol. "A bored housewife jumps back into the spy game again in 'The Paris Diversion'." Washingtonpost.com, 16 May 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A585698397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0a790ee1. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Pavone, Chris TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 24 ISBN: 978-0-3746-0476-9

Secrets, lies, and revenge permeate this taut international thriller.

The recently married Ariel Pryce wakes up one morning in a Lisbon hotel room, expecting her husband, John Wright, to be in bed beside her. He isn't. She looks for a note, tries calling him, queries hotel staff, all to no avail. She calls Portuguese police and then the American Embassy, who wonder at first if Ms. Pryce isn't some crazy lady wasting everyone's time. But a lot happens muito r�pido: Ariel receives a ransom demand for 3 million euros to be delivered within 48 hours for John's safe release by unknown captors. The CIA knows that John is not who he claims to be and thinks that Ariel "must be more important than she's letting on." For one thing, she changed her name from Laurel Turner in her adulthood. A nosy American reporter starts poking around. Moving between past and present and among the viewpoints of Ariel and her several observers, Pavone uses short scenes to build fast-paced tension. Who is behind the kidnapping, and why? Ariel isn't rich, and there's only one way--blackmail--to come up with the dough. She and her extortee can inflict great harm on each other, and in fact one of them had a head start years earlier. So will she get the cash and rescue John? Then suspicious pol�cia stop Ariel from boarding a flight to the U.S., the CIA monitors her calls, at least one CIA observer ponders the value of having her whacked, and a relentless, coke-sniffing reporter is convinced he smells a blockbuster scoop. Surprise builds on surprise, and although the reader may sense where the complicated plot is headed, the twists keep coming. Two nights in Lisbon sound like a fun vacation as long as someone isn't trying to uncover a horrible secret from your past.

This high-stakes drama grabs your attention and doesn't let go.

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"Pavone, Chris: TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696498585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c507cb0d. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Two Nights in Lisbon. By Chris Pavone. May 2022. 448p. Farrar/MCD, $28 (9780374604769).

As was stunningly evident in his two Kate Moore thrillers (The Expats, 2012, and The Paris Diversion, 2019), Pavone has that special ability to construct plots that are artworks in their own right, marvels of architecture and intelligence. He's at it again in this jaw-dropping thriller about a woman, Ariel Pryce, who wakes up in Lisbon to find her husband, financial consultant John Wright, missing and possibly kidnapped. Much frustration follows, as the Lisbon police and those at the American Embassy doubt Ariel's version of what happened. As we learn more of Ariel's backstory, including the reason why she is reluctant to ask for help from a politician she knew in her life before John, we go all in for this woman who has survived abuse from multiple men and who has reinvented herself several times, moving from a failed actress to rich man's wife to "pregnant woman with no money and no assets and no skills and no job." And, throughout it all, she has been "a disbelieved woman." Not this time, we think, even though we sort of know Pavone could be setting us up. (Pro tip: Pavone is always setting us up.) However, like the great Ross Thomas, Pavone uses byzantine plotting to do more than exhaust his readers; with all their surprises, his plots are finally tools to reveal character. Another jewel in an already-bedecked crown.--Bill Ott

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
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Ott, Bill. "Two Nights in Lisbon." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 17, 1 May 2022, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711045753/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ac2b785f. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

The heroine of Chris Pavone's new thriller, ''Two Nights in Lisbon,'' learns that double lives can have hidden costs.

TWO NIGHTS IN LISBONBy Chris Pavone436 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

It's been 10 years since Chris Pavone made his showstopping thriller debut with ''The Expats,'' a book so twisty and offbeat that it established his spy stories as unmissable. His tricks were exotic then, but through four subsequent books they've become familiar. He likes strong, sneaky heroines. Fake identities. Married characters who keep secrets from their spouses. Intricate espionage. Touristy settings. Enough far-fetched subplots to make heads spin.

With each new effort, Pavone's novelty value has diminished. And he mentions in his acknowledgments that his latest, ''Two Nights in Lisbon,'' has been through many drafts. If the headlong narrative brio that propelled ''The Expats'' though Luxembourg has waned, perhaps that's because Pavone's latest protagonist, Ariel Pryce, is so fretful and talky. She's not much like the first book's Kate Moore, who played decorative wife when she had to but could also crawl onto a window ledge and into a stranger's locked bedroom when necessary.

Pavone still has game. He'll dupe any reader who takes the plot of ''Two Nights in Lisbon'' at face value. This story nominally starts once Ariel awakens after a night of wild passion to find that her husband, a dashing businessman named John Wright, has disappeared. He left their Lisbon hotel while she was sleeping. She has no idea why.

John is much younger than Ariel. They haven't been married long. And he seemed perfect to Ariel, who may herself be a cipher. She has lived at least two different lives under two different names and kept them separate, or so the book tells us. ''When someone seems too good to be true,'' Pavone writes, ''he's not.''

Thus begin Ariel's efforts to figure out who she married. And why he has apparently been kidnapped. She is not eager to deal with the local police, let alone the higher international authorities that eventually take an interest in John's vanishing. But she's stranded in Portugal, John's personal history seems confounding and she needs to figure out what happened to him. So several layers of law enforcement are introduced into the story.

In a maneuver that tangles his book significantly, Pavone gives it a time span much longer than the ''two nights'' of the title. It flashes back frequently to Ariel's past lives and earlier incarnations. Most recently she ran a bookstore in a small town and lived on a farm with her son and a lot of animals; this is the kind of book in which even a pet goat named Fletcher may have a secret. In any case, the flashbacks persuade us that Ariel is at least as mysterious as John.

Pavone risks whipsawing the reader as he springs surprise after surprise about how these two got to Portugal and what they were really up to. And he trots out a villainous character from an earlier book to cast a shadow over this one, which feels like recycling. Anyway, a lot of energy goes into the idea that John was kidnapped and Ariel must raise a ransom. The search for help leads her to a shadowy figure she knows and abhors.

''Two Nights in Lisbon'' strays so far from its original setup that it feels like more than one book. Most of what we know about Ariel casts her as a relatively conventional figure, but Pavone ratchets up his story to create impossibly high stakes. There is contemporary political resonance in the real story he's telling. There's a strong emphasis on abused women and the world's refusal to take them seriously. Ariel has experienced victimhood throughout her multiple lives, and the author has trouble balancing her obvious strength with her history of having been exploited. You could argue that this matters to the book's denouement or just deem it hard to buy.

Pavone strongly argues against the strictures that can shield powerful predators from repercussions. And he makes an important plot point out of Ariel's enforced secrecy. He is setting up a whopper of an ending, one that may be too much for even his most devoted readers, who have had to grapple with the implausible before. He built ''The Accident,'' which overlaps with this book, around the idea of a tell-all manuscript so dangerous that it imperils whoever has it. While reading that book you had to believe such a manuscript could be real. What he asks us to accept this time is even more extreme.

Although Pavone fans may find ''Two Nights in Lisbon'' quite a stretch, this smart, calculating author remains many notches above others in his field. He is worldly and inviting when it comes to the book's mostly European settings. His book captures a vacation's escapism even as its heroine feels walls closing in. And his smaller scenes, like those set in Ariel's bookstore, feel much less forced than his high-stakes ones. It's a nice touch to say that the bookstore, with its coffee and greeting cards, does ''a brisk business in banal.'' Ariel can be accused of many things, but banality isn't one.

Two Nights in Lisbon By Chris Pavone 436 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

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Maslin, Janet. "A Kidnapping, and the Situation Only Worsens." New York Times, 2 June 2022, p. C2(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A705683833/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=550e1375. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

Pavone, Chris THE DOORMAN MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $27.00 5, 20 ISBN: 9780374604790

A Manhattan doorman faces unwanted excitement in this thriller by the author ofTwo Nights in Lisbon(2022).

Ex-Marine Chicky Diaz has been a doorman at the Bohemia Apartments for 28 years. He is "relentlessly upbeat," never breaks rules, never bad-mouths anyone. Everyone trusts him. He unfailingly greets each resident by name as they come and go--"Welcome home Mr. Goff" and "Let me get that bag for you Mrs. Frumm"--and seems unbothered by the financial and social chasm separating them from him. Chicky idly muses that anyone could kill or be killed around there with no one knowing it was going to happen. Nice foreshadowing, that. A widower with two daughters in college, he faces a mountain of unpaid medical bills because of his late wife's cancer, and he owes a ton of back rent. By stark contrast, the Bohemia's residents are all filthy rich. The building is "littered with Picassos, Chagalls, Renoirs. It's practically a museum." Wealthiest among them are Emily and Whit Longworth, a billionaire couple due to his business selling high-tech body armor. Before meeting Whit, Emily once cried after accidentally wasting 90 cents for an unneeded onion. And then her great beauty and sexual talent lead to matrimony and a family. Wanting to be a good person, she volunteers at a food pantry and quickly learns that it's not cool to show up for duty in a bleeping taxi. Not wanting to be a good person, Whit finds his eye wandering to hookers, and what he does with them is scary. The quiet hatred growing between Emily and Whit is key to the plot. Meanwhile, beyond the Bohemia, there is social unrest after multiple reports of cops or white-supremacist thugs killing innocent Black men. Will there be riots? More to the point, will they affect the Bohemia's wealthy residents? For his part, Chicky bears no one any ill will. He neither carries a weapon nor cares to and would just as soon be a passive observer. But he suffers a beatdown from a gang member named El Puño (The Fist) and is advised to apologize to the thug for having given offense. This leads to the bad guys learning what wealth lies inside those apartments. A plan develops. Will bullets fly? Will blood flow? Is the pope Catholic? Social, racial, and political commentary add color to the profanity-peppered pages.

Readers will root for the doorman in this enjoyable yarn.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Pavone, Chris: THE DOORMAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325721/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bd3b1e49. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

In Chris Pavone's new novel, ''The Doorman,'' the real world closes in on residents of a luxury apartment building.

THE DOORMAN, by Chris Pavone

Chicky Diaz, the title character of Chris Pavone's new novel, has worked at the Bohemia, one of the Upper West Side's grandest apartment buildings, for nearly three decades. Along with fetching packages, hailing cabs and ignoring the often egregious behavior of the spoiled occupants, he serves as a buffer against the outside world. It's his job to keep the chaos out.

But reality in all its unpleasantness has a way of penetrating even a faux-medieval castle surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped with golden spikes, as the people in the building are about to find out. The action unfolds over a single tumultuous day that begins with an ominous intimation -- someone might get killed before it's over -- and gathers force like an impending storm.

Pavone is the author of five previous books, literary thrillers characterized by elegant writing and intricate plotting. This is something bigger in tone and ambition. While a mystery hums beneath the narrative -- who won't make it out of the book alive? -- ''The Doorman'' is better read as a state-of-the-city novel, a kaleidoscopic portrait of New York at a singularly strange moment.

As the day goes on, demonstrators protesting the latest killing of a Black man by a white cop are amassing reinforcements and heading to Billionaire's Row on 57th Street, home to a cluster of obscenely tall buildings featuring grotesquely overpriced apartments. A counterprotest of white ''law-and-order MAGA-capped dudes, the stand-your-grounders,'' is also building steam, bolstered by more white men in fatigues and bulletproof vests riding around in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags.

Chicky's immediate concern is what to do if the revolution (or the counter-revolution) comes to the Bohemia. But he has longer-term worries, including an unwitting beef with a thug named El Puño and crushing debt totaling $300,000, mostly from medical bills accrued during his beloved late wife's battle with cancer. (This while working in a building where he once overheard someone bark into the phone: ''It's what ... 80 million dollars? Ninety. Whatever. It's nothing.'')

Even as he digs into Chicky's life, Pavone gives equal time to a host of other memorable characters, all connected by a restless dissatisfaction that is magnified by the city itself. ''The corrosive thing about New York is that there's always someone with more -- more money, more fame, more power, more respect,'' he writes.

There's Emily Longworth in apartment 11 C-D, for instance, caught in the maw of Pavone's equal-opportunity satire -- weaponized over-wokeness coming from the left and enraged proto-fascism coming from the right. On the one hand, she's married to a loathsome man who has made billions selling a new kind of body armor to warlords and fundamentalists and who, when she mentions her volunteer work at a food pantry, snaps: ''Nobody's forcing you to spoon out slop to illegal immigrants.''

On the other, she has a daughter who wonders whether the family should ''do a land acknowledgment'' before dinner to recognize the territory ''stolen from ingenious peoples ... who were slaughtered in a holocaust'' and who announces that her teacher -- the one who wore a ''Tax the Rich'' T-shirt to Parents' Day -- ''used to be mister but now they is mix.''

''Are you sure that's the right, um ... verb agreement?''' Emily asks.

Meanwhile, her father, a lifelong New York Democrat, ''told a dirty joke at work, got called out by a young woman of color, canceled, bought out of his partnership, career over, and suddenly he was watching Fox News day and night.''

With its laser-sharp satire, its delicious set pieces in both rich and poor neighborhoods -- a co-op board meeting, a Harlem food pantry and more -- and its portrait of a restive city torn apart by inequality, resentment and excess, ''The Doorman'' naturally invites comparison to ''The Bonfire of the Vanities,'' Tom Wolfe's lacerating dissection of New York in the 1980s.

(Let us adjust for inflation. Sherman McCoy, ''Bonfire'''s master-of-the-universe main character, struggled to get by on his $1 million salary as a bond trader. One of Pavone's characters has made more than $500 million selling his bubble-wrap company to a conglomerate.)

No one can beat the muscularity of Wolfe's prose or the savagery of his satire. But Pavone's humor is more humane, his sympathy for the characters' struggles and contradictions more acute. With his eye for absurdity and ear for nuance, he seems as if he's writing not from some elevated place high above the city, but from within it.

How, in a single book, can you characterize a place and a time this varied and this unwieldy? If ''The Doorman'' suffers from anything, it's a surfeit of riches -- details and digressions that can lead you away from the central story. But all of it accelerates into a tour de force ending (this is where it becomes a thriller) that rewards close attention. I had to read it twice to make sure I understood exactly who did what to whom.

I'm not sure where Pavone stands at this bewildering cultural moment -- whether he has any answers, and not just questions. But maybe the last word should go to the Bohemia's superintendent, Olek, a Ukrainian immigrant who has found the freedom to be a gay man in New York (though not at work, on account of his co-workers' homophobic jokes).

''Americans were complacent, with their Miranda rights and public defenders, their supermarkets and free vaccinations, their Grindr, their Chelsea,'' he thinks. ''Everyday luxuries made it hard to anticipate worst-case scenarios. Americans thought the world was ending if their electricity went out and they couldn't charge their phones to post on Instagram. They had no idea.''

THE DOORMAN | Chris Pavone | MCD x FSG | 388 pp. | $30

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Lyall, Sarah. "Capture the Castle." The New York Times Book Review, 13 July 2025, p. 15. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847498881/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=96579a67. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.

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