Book review of The Doorman by Chris Pavone

Taxi hailer, package handler, bouncer, greeting dispenser, secret keeper . . . Chicky Diaz wears a multitude of hats beneath his bell crown cap as he patrols the “little patch of earth” outside the Bohemia Apartments. But all is not well in the city today, and he’s going to need more than his calm demeanor and understated charm to protect the building’s well-heeled residents. Today, he’s going to need a gun.

Chris Pavone, New York Times-bestselling author of jet-setting thrillers including The Expats and Two Nights in Lisbon, sticks close to home in his sixth novel, The Doorman, set in New York City’s posh Central Park West. At the novel’s outset, the city is on tenterhooks after the cops have fatally shot an unarmed Black man, leading to street protests. This makes it a particularly bad time for one of the Bohemia’s megarich residents, Whit Longworth, to find his fortune-building past as a war profiteer in the media spotlight.

On the homefront, Whit’s wife, Emily, is poised at the edge of cancellation, as her liberal cohorts in nonprofit charity circles now see her husband’s business as radioactive. While she is furious with Whit for putting her in this bind, her marriage’s ironclad prenup has handcuffed Emily to him, at least for the immediate future.

Meanwhile, several floors down, gallerist Julian Sonnenberg finds himself equally trapped in a failing marriage, with his heart under assault, both figuratively by his infatuation with Mrs. Longworth and literally by a failing valve that could cost him his life if put under any additional strain. And strain is out there by the bucket load, as Chicky tries to navigate around his criminal-adjacent extended family, associates of which would like nothing more than to compel the doorman to be the linchpin for a robbery at the very apartments it’s his job to protect.

While formulaic “MAGA vs. woke” tropes scattered throughout tend to flatten his characters’ three-dimensionality, Pavone proves to be a master of deception, keeping the reader guessing the direction from which violence may come. When it inevitably does, it arrives as Hemingway’s famously described bankruptcy from The Sun Also Rises: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Breathtakingly, in fact.