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In Review: The Expats
By Chris Pavone
Reviewed by Macy Walsh
While it’s hard for us to tear ourselves away from the authors we truly love, it’s always fun to discover a new writer, especially when it’s one as obviously talented as Chris Pavone. As a first offering, Pavone’s The Expats is an impressive thriller filled with exhilarating double-crosses.
What happens when an expert CIA agent with fifteen years in the world’s most dangerous spy game gives it all up to be a stay-at-home mom, exchanging assassinations and double dealing for playdates, coffee mornings and tennis lessons? That’s the reality of life for Kate Moore, whose husband Dexter comes home one day and announces that he’s received an extremely lucrative offer to move the family from Washington, D.C. to Luxembourg for a high profile IT job in online banking security. Kate finds herself secretly relieved, and not for the reasons you might ordinarily expect. Sure, not having to worry about money and living a posh European lifestyle are appealing to Kate, but she’s more excited about the life that she’ll be able to get away from.
Kate has a secret. A big one. Her husband has no idea that when she heads off to Atlanta or L.A. on a business trip, her ultimate destination is more often Prague or Veracruz. While she has now held a supervisory position for some time, the years of working covert ops in the field and keeping secrets for a living have taken their toll, leaving her yearning for a sense of normalcy. She’s ready to ditch her old life for good, but Kate finds that life isn’t quite finished with her yet.
Shortly after their arrival in Luxembourg, Dexter begins acting very strangely, keeping odd hours and hiding the truth. Given all the secrets she’s kept from him, however, Kate tries to give him the benefit of the doubt. Her days pass “in a cold thick fog of kitchen mopping and grocery shopping and pot scrubbing” as Kate learns about the realities of life with two small boys, which offers no escape from LEGO pieces, playgrounds and SpongeBob SquarePants. As Dexter works all hours at his mysterious new job, Kate makes friends with other mothers, joins the American Women’s Club of Luxembourg and meets an American couple, Julia and Bill Maclean. But despite the change of scenery and social circle, Kate is bored – intensely, dangerously bored. So when she decides something’s off about her new friends the Macleans, she begins to investigate.
Kate can’t tell if her suspicions are real or a delusion dreamed up to fill her empty life, “to have something to do. Anything.” But Kate notices that the Macleans keep mum about their pasts and always seem to turn up when her family is holidaying around Europe. Before long, Kate finds herself clinging to a windowsill outside Bill’s office, and “this is where she belonged, up here on this ledge. This is what had been missing from her life.” Tension builds notch by notch as Kate uncovers deception beneath deception, lies inside lies. Nothing, not even her family, is what it seems and she’s terrified that her dirty past as a CIA operative is finally catching up with her.
Pavone, a former book publishing editor who lived in Luxembourg for two years with his family, has created a startlingly real heroine in Kate. She’s a former spy with a talent for languages and maps, hand-to-hand combat and guns; an expert assassin, cold enough and capable enough to kill. But Kate is no cipher; she’s also a fiercely loving mother and a wife who has kept her past secret from her husband all these years, and she’s terrified when her two worlds start to collide.
Expertly and intricately plotted, with a story spiraling into disaster and a satisfyingly huge amount of twists and turns to keep any reader guessing, The Expats certainly doesn’t feel like a first novel. This is an impressively assured debut and a worthy entry into the thriller genre.
