The Expats: A Novel Author: Chris Pavone | Language: English | ISBN:
B005NKGEP2 | Format: EPUB
The Expats: A Novel Description
EDGAR AWARD WINNER * ANTHONY AWARD WINNER
Can we ever escape our secrets?
In the cobblestoned streets of Luxembourg, Kate Moore's days are filled with playdates and coffee mornings, her weekends spent in Paris and skiing in the Alps. But Kate is also guarding a tremendous, life-defining secret—one that's become so unbearable that it begins to unravel her newly established expat life. She suspects that another American couple are not who they claim to be; her husband is acting suspiciously; and as she travels around Europe, she finds herself looking over her shoulder, increasingly terrified that her own past is catching up with her. As Kate begins to dig, to uncover the secrets of the people around her, she finds herself buried in layers of deceit so thick they threaten her family, her marriage, and her life.
Stylish and sophisticated, fiercely intelligent, and expertly crafted, The Expats proves Chris Pavone to be a writer of tremendous talent.
Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content
- File Size: 1635 KB
- Print Length: 338 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 030799029X
- Publisher: Broadway Books; Reprint edition (March 6, 2012)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005NKGEP2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,172 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Espionage - #15
in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Espionage - #15
in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue
If your thing in a spy thriller is tension aplenty with lots of secrets and puzzles, you will enjoy this book. Chris Pavone excels in the double-double cross and even makes you laugh at it. He is equally good at putting you right in the middle of whatever description he's got going. Europe has never been so conjured up for the reader's imagination. The plot is a good one, often curved around the unexpected, and it's a tiny bit implausible, but not so implausible it interferes with your intelligence.
Where Pavone falls into mediocrity is in the details. At times there are just too many of them. Other times they are half-presented, then dropped too soon. An example of too many is this entire paragraph: "There was a squat hard-plastic container of cardboard coasters featuring a baroque coat-of-arms, with a lion and pennants and maybe snakes and a sun and a crescent moon, and stripes, and a castle turret, plus gothic lettering that she couldn't make out because from where she sat it was upsidedown, this highly stylized thick black lettering." The description plays no part in the scene or the plot. Oh, the word "this" is Pavone's favorite, used far too many times.
As for a detail dropped too soon, the protagonist, Kate, sees some nuns, making her feel guilty, for what we know not.
Writes Pavone, "Kate was impressed with how many words this woman used to communicate her ideas." Funny, I was thinking the very same thing about the author!
The biggest problem for me is the character, Kate. She thinks like a man trying to think like a woman, and often it just doesn't work. The biggest failure is the relationship between Kate and Julia. They often relate more like two males would. Kate and Dexter also interact sort of by the numbers.
I read the blurbs for The Expats and, expecting some fun, listened to the book on CD during a long trip. What a let down. I had to hear all the bad writing and silly plot elements that I might have overlooked had I been reading and able to skim. The main character, Kate, is former CIA, now a trailing spouse with a husband working in Luxembourg. She's the only CIA agent you ever heard of who, when surprised, stands there with her mouth hanging open. And when she tries to close it, she can't. She's THAT surprised!
Kate never told her husband, Dexter, about her CIA job, and for plot reasons she contemplates telling him now. But she figures, genius that she is, that if she tells him the basic fact of her former profession, she will have to tell him every tiny detail of her work, including an harrowing event she prefers to keep secret. Really? She can't imagine giving an outline of her days as an operative, then claiming the rest is classified? This is the clever CIA spook?
Kate also gives newcomers in her life open access in many ways that we yokels who never held a government clearance find strangely naive. Could our country really count on such simpletons?
The book was twice as long as it should have been, stuffed with filler such as "she grabbed the mouse and moved the cursor". I don't believe anything I've read has droned through that level of detail! Descriptions were terrible, such as "he had the skin of an old Shar Pei". As if the skin of a young Shar Pei was smooth!
The reader of the CD version, Mozhan Marno, was no help. She narrated the voice of all male characters in the same monotonous, low register, making every man sound identically stilted and robotic.
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