I just finished "The Expats" by Chris Pavone, and it was the best spy thriller I've read in a while.
I don't usually read the reviews or forward at the front of a book, but since I had never heard of Pavone, this time I did. I regretted it. In his intro letter, the editor of Crown Publishing Group compares Pavone to John Le Carre. Ugh. Honestly, I've picked up "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" not less than three times in recent years and tried to read it, and each time I set it aside before finishing the first chapter. But, I decided to give "The Expats" a try.
The premise of the story is that there's a woman, Kate, who is married with two kids. She lives in D.C., and she's a spy. Or, she was. And she was good, but then she did something (you have to read to find out what) and she's no longer in the field.
Then her husband decides they're going to pack up and move to Luxembourg, so she quits her job. Her husband is a super geek who's really smart at computer stuff, but not smart enough to realize his wife was a spy.
Then in Luxembourg Kate settles in to the stay-at-home mom routine, which is portrayed as mind-numbingly dull for someone in a foreign country who knows no one and whose husband works all the time. But Kate wants to be "normal." I'm not sure if SAHMs reading this would be insulted at the portrail of their lives, or if they'd embrace the Kate character because her fictional backstory is something they dream of.
The action happens in Luxembourg as Kate learns her husband has secrets of her own, but an unreasonable period goes by while Kate, who feels so guilty for keeping the fact that she was a spy secret from her husband, refuses to check into her husband's business.
First, why I liked the book:
It was easy to read. Since I never got through a Le Carre book, I can't compare how the characters or plot is developed, but the writing was much easier to read and easy to follow.
The characters are interesting. I liked that the number of characters was kept to the bare minimum, and they were each developed well.
Pavone uses foreshadowing and cliffhangers to make you want to keep reading. That's good; it keeps the action moving and you want to find out what happens. The part of the book that some people may find annoying is that there are two timelines that run through the novel. There's the main story that starts from when Kate is quitting her job and they're leaving D.C. Then there's present-day storyline that you know will take you to the end because it's marked "today" with the time of day.
The other thing I liked was that the book had a clear ending and most of the loose ends in the plot were resolved.
There are a few things I didn't like about the book. One was that there was an ongoing sense of danger, but it felt imagined. Even once the "bad guys" are revealed, when it seemed to me that there was no physical danger, Kate is still worried about physical danger. It felt contrived.
And, as with any spy book, you imagine that things don't really operate like they do in the book. I think this is especially true for the reason Kate left the field.
Overall, "The Expats" is a fun, quick-to-read spy book with French phrases and facts about Luxembourg thrown in.
