Chris Pavone
Award-winning author


Chris Pavone is the author of five international thrillers. The Expats won both the 2013 Edgar and Anthony Awards for Best First Novel. His books have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. They have been developed for film and TV by CBS Films, Paramount, DreamWorks, and Chernin/Endeavor.

He has appeared on Face the Nation, Good Day New York, All Things Considered, and the BBC. The New York Times has profiled him on the arts’ front page. He has spoken at more than a hundred events, including bookshops, libraries, book festivals, private luncheons, and galas.

Chris Pavone 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 associate publisher. In 2008 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.

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HARDCOVER
MCD

Tautly wound and expertly crafted, Two Nights in Lisbon is a riveting thriller about a woman under pressure, and how far she will go when everything is on the line.
THE THREE-DECADE LONG ARC OF TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON In the early 1990s, working on the books of John Grisham and Pat Conroy at the height of their popularity, I started to learn what it meant to be a commercial novelist; a decade later, working on Giada De Laurentiis’s first cookbook, what it meant to be a beautiful famous woman in America. In 2016, I was sickened by the mass indifference to the Access Hollywood tape; in 2018, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings made me see that there was one small thing I could do about it.
FROM 9/11 IN TRIBECA TO THE PARIS DIVERSION On the night of September 10, 2001, I took a Benadryl to help clear my allergy-stuffed head, so on 9/11 I awoke late, aiming to leave for work by a quarter to nine. I was one minute behind, and the best feature of my apartment, a thousand feet from the North Tower, was its view of the World Trade Center, which suddenly had a hole in it. That was the beginning of a day in which I feared for my life a few times, and watched scores of people leap to their deaths; these were the last moments I’d spend in my home for more than a month, the onset of a long season of terror. Then fifteen years later, on a trip to terrorism-torn Paris, flashbacks to NYC in late 2001 inspired me to write the 9/11 novel I’d long known I’d eventually write.
Praise for TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON “There’s no such thing as a book you can’t put down, but this one was close.”
—Stephen King

“I defy anyone to read the first twenty pages of this breakneck novel, then try to put it down for five minutes. 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.”
—John Grisham, author of A Time for Mercy

“Chris Pavone's stylish, sophisticated thrillers are in a class of their own. In Two Nights in Lisbon he once again marries an explosive plot with an intimate and nuanced exploration of a marriage and the secrets we keep from those we love the most. I was rapt from the book’s propulsive beginning to its deeply satisfying conclusion. An exceptional, exciting read.” —Cristina Alger, author of Girls Like Us