The Expats by Chris Pavone

(I need to review our own content from time to time. when I looked at my post on our site's design, I thought it look familiar. Turns out Midwest Dave beat me to it. No matter, check out both reviews for two takes on the same story.)

He does something in computer security. She works for the State Department. They live a comfortable, but check-to-check life in Washington, DC with their 2 preschool sons. When Dexter gets a job offer in Luxembourg to crank up electronic security for a bank chain (for big bucks), they see it as a chance to get ahead while living the expat life in Europe.

That means Kate has to give up her decent job and occasional travel and, with two kids in tow, join a small band of expat American women whose husbands all do something in finance, who’ve given up a nanny in the US to become housewives in a strange country.

When you’ve had a good job and now scrub toilets, take kids to/from school, have coffee with the other moms, well, life is pretty boring. Dexter gets to travel around Europe to various bank branches and the tasks he agreed to do become more and more demanding of his time. Kate really doesn’t know what Dexter does. He tries to explain, but it’s just too complex to explain to a novice such as Kate.

A new couple joins this expat community. Bill and Julia. Childless. He, like the rest of the husbands, is also in finance. Bill and Dexter become tennis buds, so Julia and Kate are sort of expected to become friends by default. Julia is a whinny thing from Chicago (and Kate hates Chicago). Kate thinks Julia sort of follows her around because she’s too insecure to go out on her own.

But Kate’s bored mind starts to think that maybe Julia is following her and that creeps Kate out. So she does a little digging on her own and her mind starts to play wild ‘what if’, ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ games as she tries to put together some back story for this mouse.

Because that’s what Kate does . . . or did. See, for 15 years, Kate didn’t work for the State Department. She was a case officer for the CIA, mostly in central and South America. She learned from the best how to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, and, yes, even kill. More than once. When she married Dexter and had kids, she shifted to an analyst position. Still in the game, but on the sidelines. And what she learns is that not only are Bill and Julia hiding secrets, so is Dexter . . . and herself, too.

Secrets about their individual and collective past, a Serbian colonel, a Mexican thug/politician, a Dutch prostitute, a really touchy Russian General, and a missing cache of 50 million Euros. Amidst the boring day-to-day minutiae of an expat housewife, Kate manages to revive some old skills, both psychological and physical, to unravel what the hell is going on, without telling Dexter just who she really is, or was.

And that’s what The Expats is all about - what do you do when you (both) withheld secrets from the one you should trust implicitly. For probably 85% of the book, Pavone drags us through Kate’s daily doldrums and her hyperactive imagination. That he keeps you reading page after page after page of daily expat life is quite remarkable. With each tiny and insignificant reveal, we get sucked just that much deeper into Kate’s paranoia. And when we get to the BIG REVEAL at the end, the layers of the onion get peeled back one by one and we learn that we really did have all the information needed, but those damn secrets just kept getting in the way (shades of The Usual Suspects?). 

This 2012 book is Pavone’s first novel and when a newcomer’s first book hits the NY Times best seller list, you can bet it’s had some pretty good word-of-mouth support. The last initial effort in the spy thriller genre I read that grabbed me this strongly was Alex Berensen’s The Faithful Spy. The complex web of lies and manipulations reminded me of Olen Steinhauer – two authors in my power rotation. High praise indeed. So, now I sit, eagerly awaiting for my name to rise to the top of the wait list for his next, The Accident.