Book Summary and Reviews of The Doorman by Chris Pavone

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Cathryn_Conroy

A Captivating Thriller Packed with Surprises and Simmering Tension
This is a slow-building suspenseful thriller that soon threatens to boil over in a pressure-cooker plot that will keep you up way past your bedtime.

Written by Chris Pavone, this is the story of the Bohemia, a posh apartment building on New York City's Upper West Side that is so exclusive and private that it doesn't even have a street address on the outside of the building. We follow the stories of the doorman and the residents in two apartments, and those stories are filled with lust and love, sex and violence, intrigue and murder.

The background of the plot that soon takes centerstage is ripped from today's headlines: In separate incidents days apart, White police officers have brutally murdered two Black men, setting the city on edge. Protesters, including hordes of angry MAGA supporters in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags, are gathering in multiple places in New York City. It's a powder keg that is ready to explode.

This isn't your typical thriller. It's also a story about the political state of our big U.S. cities with all our prejudices and fury about racial and economic disparities on full display.

The characters around which the novel revolves are:
• The head doorman is Chicky Diaz, a middle-aged man who has recently lost his beloved wife to cancer and owes lots of money to loan sharks, his landlord, and his credit card companies. He's never done this before, but the circumstances are dire. Chicky is packing a gun while on the job as the Bohemia doorman.

• Emily Merriweather Longworth and Whitaker Hamilton Longword live in the penthouse. Whit's obscene wealth, built through nefarious means, is almost as enormous as his ego. He has developed some weird sexual proclivities, but that is only one of Emily's problems. She hates her husband, but she knows she can't leave him with that iron-clad, unbreakable prenup she signed. Meanwhile, in addition to regularly volunteering in a Harlem food pantry, she is having an affair that could cost her everything—including her life or her lover's.

• Jennifer and Julian Sonnenberg live on the second floor in a modest apartment. She is a high-powered attorney, while he owns an art gallery with his best friend, Ellington, a gay Black man. While he's dealing with a potential lawsuit that could bankrupt his business, Julian has also received some somber and frightening news from his doctor.

The ending is an action-packed page-turner that is, at first, surprising and then shocking…and then disturbing once it all sinks in.

Written in a lively, narrative style with a big and bold multilayered plot and chapter-ending cliffhangers, this is a captivating novel packed with surprises and simmering tension.

Cloggie Downunder

not quite up to Pavone’s usual standard.
The Doorman is the fourth stand-alone novel by award-winning American author, Chris Pavone. On a Tuesday evening shift, the doorman at the Bohemia Apartments on Central Park West, NYC, has armed himself with a gun. Chicky Diaz hasn’t shot a weapon since his army days, but the unrest in the city isn’t the only reason he has decided to carry.

Over the course of that Tuesday, three narrators: Chicky Diaz, Emily Longworth from 11 C-D, and Julian Sonnenberg from 2A relate the events of the day, and recollect over months and years, what has led to the fraught situation they face that night.

Pavone weaves a lengthy tale that encompasses, on a personal level, marriages happy, unhappy, and prematurely shortened; how the woes of health care costs in the US, education costs, credit card, rent and loans can result in an impossible debt spiral; unwelcome news from a cardiologist; infidelity; and being cancelled due to the dubious associations of one’s apparently villainous spouse.

More generally, there’s the economic divide, racism, domestic abuse, the threat of mob violence in reaction to Black deaths by police, and pressure to facilitate crime from violent criminals.

Pavone’s protagonists certainly have depth and some appeal, and the reader can’t help but invest in their fate. He gives some of them insightful observations: “It’s only in hindsight that you can identify when everything was as close to perfect as it would ever be.” Many of the secondary characters, though, are obscenely rich, unlikeable and often downright nasty.

He easily evokes his setting and captures the ambience of Trump’s America, but the story does drag until the final pages, with the real action only in the last 15. The twisty climax and resolution save this from a lower rating: not quite up to Pavone’s usual standard.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Head of Zeus/Aries.

Other books by Chris Pavone at BookBrowse

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