The Expats: A Novel

For no good reason at all, the author tells this story by jumping around constantly in the book's timeline. On one page you're reading about stuff that happened 5 years ago and the next page two years from now then the next page two days ago then the next page three weeks from now. Just stupid and infuriating. Then a ridiculous amount of filler material that has nothing to do with anything--on my Kindle I often found myself scanning and turning pages every two seconds just to get past the blowing leaves or the description of moms picking up kids at school. When you finally are told what the plot is (at about the 80% mark) you are forced to ask why the hell this guy didn't tell the story in a straight chronological timeline?

You know at least some of the reviews here are real, because they're all over the map. For myself, at first I found it hard to keep track of what "time" any given episode was occurring in. Then I realized that the "present" is clearly marked (in Paris), and that the bulk of the action is Kate's remembering back on a "past" (in Luxembourg), and in that past she's remembering other "past" moments in her life back beyond that. It's very clever. It's also a lot less artificial than the current overly-popular narrative technique that artificially carves up a narrative into different periods and places. More than that, though, the plot is just so endlessly clever, as layer upon layer of duplicity is revealed. And the writing is wonderful — the sentences themselves (the author is a former editor, after all), but most of all the observations of life in Europe, which anyone who's ever lived in Paris or Germany will instantly recognize as absolutely true. I loved this, and I plan to start plowing through Pavone's other books.

I found "The Expats" a rather frustrating read. The time line was all over the place and a number of times I didn't know if she was in the present or her past life. Also, I couldn't get a feel for how long they were living in Europe -- 6 months? 2 years? I also found it very irritating to have to keep hearing about how bored she was as just a mother. We all know laundry isn't the funnest thing to do so I really don't want to hear about it every 20 pages. I kept reading in the hope that the story line would pick up. Can't say that it ever happened and I was relieved when I finally finished.

How and why this novel won the 2013 Edgar for Best First Novel by an American Author is the greatest mystery of all. I have to wonder if the award was intended to be an insiders' joke on the reading public by the publishing industry. The recognition has to be based on Chris Pavone having once been an editor rather than on his mastery of storytelling and writing craft.If the Edgar award had truly been based on a newbie's display of writing craft, then three of the other nominees: Black Fridays by Michael Sears, Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman, and Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal would have surpassed The Expats by a significant margin. The writing craft and the storytelling of those three novels are so much better than The Expats that it doesn't seem fair including The Expats in the comparison. The only logical conclusion is that the Edgar award was based on the author's long-standing relationships within the publishing industry, and not because he wrote such a great novel... which unfortunately means the award wasn't a fair competition for the other finalists. You know the old saying, "It's who you know, not what you know."I am the type of reader who will finish reading every book I begin reading, regardless of how bad it is or how disinterested I become. I started and finished four other novels, plus one non-fiction book, during the time period it took me to start and finish this one. I could only tolerate reading 3-5 pages at a time before story boredom and/or laborious writing drove me to the pages of another book. If I could, I would ask the author to reimburse the cost of this book.As for some specifics: 1) Kate was not believable as a CIA field agent, unless incompetency is part of the job requirements. 2) The plot takes forever to develop. 3) The continuous stream of flashbacks is both tedious and distracting. 4) The author wastes the reader's time with endless and wordy descriptions of routine/mundane events. As example: "It was lightly drizzling, or misting, or whatever it's called when minuscule bits of water, too fine to feel distinct drops, are drifting down out of the sky." Twenty-eight words to communicate something everyone already knows, when "it was lightly drizzling" (just four words) would've done the job just as well, in fact: better. This overly wordy style can be found on almost every page. Do the math: this novel should've been (and easily could have been) a short story of less than 100 pages rather than a 352-page, word-heavy, novel-length short story. Like I said, I think this novel and the Edgar award it received was just a joke by the publishing industry being played on the reading public. 5) The author appears to own stock in "ly" adverbs and thus uses as many of them as he possibly can on each and every page. 6) My biggest complaint is that the writing draws attention to itself, rather than to the story.Another example of poor craftsmanship: "Kate was taken aback by this excessive garrulousness." Huh? The meaning of garrulousness is "excessively talkative." Which means the author, in his desire to display his ability to overwrite, actually wrote: "Kate was taken aback by this excessive, excessive talking." It seems the author believes in the old axiom: "Why use just one word, when two will be overkill and make my writing come off as being literary?"This is only the second time I have ever given a novel a 1-star rating. I read approx. 50-55 novels each year, plus another twenty or so non-fictions. Yes, it was that bad. I would not recommend this novel to anyone, not even to my worst enemy.

I’m glad I read this authors very good latest novel “The Tavelers” first or I may have passed on it after reading this one. Kate, the protagonist, becomes a bit tedious with all her self-doubt and neurotic inner dialogue. The premise of the book was interesting to me, but I was never really invested enough in any of the characters to care too much about them. That said, I was interested enough in the story line to finish it. Unfortunately, pages 278-310 are missing from the paperback I purchased, and I missed some important scenes leading up to the ending. I purchased “The Accident” along with this book & will give it a try; hopefully it’s as good as “The Traveler”.

Luxembourg, Holland, Paris, Zurich, this book takes you all over the world. Kate Moore is a soon-to-be ex-CIA officer, giving up her job to move to Luxembourg with her husband, Dexter, and their two young children. Dexter is an IT security expert. throughout their marriage, Kate has kept her career hidden from her husband. Moving to Luxembourg makes it impossible for Kate to continue in her lie. She becomes part of the Ex pat community and soon realises, two fellow ex pats, Julia and Bill are taking an unhealthy interest in the Moore family. She has her suspicions as to why this may be, using her training to delve into their backgrounds and in turn question whether she can truly trust her husband.It's a complicated plot, which I found hard to follow. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing from present day, recent present and past. It felt like a lot of research went into the book and it was well thought out, but it requires high concentration levels!

A really good storyline taking in Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, and a few other well described cities in Europe. A little bit of life in USA.Trust is at the core of relationships between spouses. International finance and fraud figure - but does it?Three different timelines made it confusing for me - I really don’t like going back very far, not too far and now.Convoluted financial dealings, intricate banking, theft & maybe getting away with it was all a bit confusing. I was left wondering who got what? I hadn’t the heart to go back to clarify. Could have been a great book and maybe it will be a movie with the fabulous descriptions of of well known hot shot places.

What a convoluted tale. About 5% through the book it appeared to be a rather staid chick lit with no clear tale. It then slowly unfolded with a storyline similar to True Lies and while I plodded on I was never really drawn in to the story. There were frequent jumps back in time but not to one point in Kate's life but literally dozens. OK, a real person will indeed return to earlier memories but it is much more difficult to keep up as a reader. Some of the more confusing jumps occurred in the current time frame when an event bare days before was interposed.Each chapter was headed by a day and time but these were not on a single timeline. We would suddenly realise that a week, a month, or years had elapsed. The final denouement was convoluted and rather than try and follow the tortuous logic I admit to skim reading to finish the damn thing.That said, the story is between 3 and 4 stars so I have given him the benefit of the doubt as my old school master said, before he beat me. I certainly won't be adding Pavone to my list of must read authors.

Like many a debut novel, The Expats is not without its flaws. It gets off to a slow start, so slow in fact that had I not got this for 20p on Kindle, I may well have given up.As a serial expat myself and someone who has worked helping other expats readjust to their new life, Kate comes across as a relocation consultant's worst nightmare - a whiny, trailing spouse with way too much time on her hands.I found the characters very unlikeable and I couldn't understand why Kate just didn't call it a day with Dexter, children or no children. Theirs is a loveless marriage so what was she doing playing along with the move to Europe for so long? Julia and Bill come across as two-dimensional and I don't really care what happens to them.If you can stick with it and suspend your disbelief, in the end the book does have something useful to say about marriage and relationships - that we all hide secrets from each other.The action and pace picks up in the second half and it becomes a tightly plotted (if somewhat implausible) read.There's an over reliance on character exposition in last part of the book which is a little irritating but given the complex nature of the plot may be the only way that readers of commercial fiction will understand what it is that is supposed to have gone on.The Expats has been skilfully marketed and managed to gain an impressive number of press reviews, some of which raved about it. The most accurate to my mind was the one written in The Washington Post which calls it "a sometimes silly spy tale."

Chris Pavone has created a pretty convincing debut novel combining the intelligence comunity, cyber crime, the expat lifestyle and parenting in a young family, set largely in Luxembourg (with significant Washington DC and Paris occurences, too).The book is told from the perspective of Kate, a CIA operative who quits, when her husband proposes a move to Luxembourg on an expat assignment working in banking security services. Relatively quickly the author then draws the reader into the web of deceit and maneuvring between Kate, with her untold back story, and Dexter, her husband, who is rather hard to pin down himself. And to a CIA trained mind every other expat housewife is a potential 'risk' that needs to be assessed, too.The writing style is fairly good and the book should generally grip you from the get go. The qualifier generally is there because of the - in my humble opinion - a rather unnecessarily confused timeline. Not that the goings on are hard to follow per se, just that the author likes jumping all over the place, between events in Luxembourg two years ago, Washington, New York and Mexico in the more distant past, and Paris of the 'current day' - the last having the day of the final confrontation broken down into small details.If you want an easy to read thriller with spycraft aspects, the book is definitely recommendable. Whether all the characters appear believable in the end is up to each reader to decide for themselves, as a relatively stress free entertainment, the book works excellently.

In the end, this is The Expats is actually a good read but as has been said previously, it would be easy to give up on it for a number of reasons.Myself being a once ive started I will finish sort of person battled on and in the end can say for certain that its a book worth reading and I can in the end understand why the book is written in such a way that it goes back and forth in time.If you havent got any patience, dont bother even trying to read this because you will lose the will to live or be tempted to skip bits.All the characters are very believable and Kate is a really well written character.The descriptions of all the places in Eusrope visited are very accurate and having red the book whilst on a trip to Amsterdam, I felt the autor had just seen exactly what I had.There are a number of small episodes that I didnt really know why they were there and didnt appear to benifit the book in anyway and the whole going back and forth in time especially early on can be very tedious.I suppose the clever thing about it is that you have to read til the end before you understand why parts of the story was in the place it was in the book.All in all, this is a good effort and I would definately read further books by this author.

I did not enjoy the book, and consequently it seemed to go on far to long. The plot is not especially credible, and although it did engage me at the start, I quickly lost interest. It lack thrills and the characters have little depth. As others have said, the constant shifting between time periods is irritating and unnecessary. Particularly so as not all the chapters open with the date, meaning the reader sometimes struggles to confirm when the action is taking place.As another reviewer noted, the book is definitely written for the American audience, with Europe presented as exotic and I found this began to grate after a while. I also found the main character somewhat irritating, and her traits seemed at times contradictory as she shifts between ruthless CIA agent and somewhat helpless housewife (at times I wished she would just pull herself together). For example, although she manages to break into several well-secured locations without detection, she at times struggles with pretty simple tasks such as buying tools from a shop. Although she is supposed to have spent a lot of time undercover in Latin America, she is frequently portrayed as at a loss in Europe principally because the culture is different from the USA and they don't speak English - both of which the reader might expect her to have anticipated and be used to, based on the back story.I cannot recommend it.

Our heroine here is Kate, an ex CIA field agent, mother to two small boys and wife of nerdy husband Dexter, who works in bank security.The book begins with Dexter persuading Kate to move to Luxembourg in order for him to follow a job opportunity in a private bank. This in itself seems unlikely of Dexter from the unambitious, nerdy background of him that's been painted for us. Dexter is also blissfully unaware of Kate's CIA life, which again seems rather far fetched.When she agrees to the move, Kate quits her CIA job, which has recently been office based anyway, and becomes a full time stay at home mum, doing the socialite rounds with all the other expat mums in a foreign city. This part of the book dragged considerably for me, andmerely helped to reinforce the thought that Kate could never have had what it would take to be a CIA field agent.After a while, maybe because of her CIA training or maybe paranoia about unauthorised activities during her CIA days catching up with her, Kate begins to suspect that all is not quite what it seems in her new life. Dexter is constantly away, and refuses to tell her anything about his work. Their closest friends, the Macleans, an expat couple like themselves, also seem to not be what they are trying to portray themselves as.Kate begins to investigate and uncovers an incredibly convoluted plot, that couldn't possibly have any basis in reality, but at least this part of the book has more pace than the first half, as the intrigues based on intrigues are unravelled.The wild time shift jumpings from present day, to past, and then further back to CIA past and beyond were often confusing. The plot was surreally convoluted and far fetched, with layer upon layer of deception that didn't allow the possibility of me working much out formyself as I went along and necessitated a big 'reveal all' scene at the end to fill me in on what I'd 'missed'. Kate was not believable as a CIA field agent, Dexter was not believable in his part of the plot either and the plot itself relied on far too much coincidence of things going just as planned.I'm sounding quite negative now, but in reality, if you like intrigue and convoluted, fantastical plots, this book holds your interest well enough once it eventually picks up pace in the second half. An ok read overall.

I just don't quite know where to start with The Expats. A great idea, let down a bit by some over-done writing and inconsistent characterisation - but the really dodgy part is the way it's been structured.There is a relatively straight-forward and entertaining story here about an ex-CIA agent and a major white collar crime, but you wouldn't know it to read the book. The timeline is all over the place, with little or no indication of when many of the scenes are set until very late into them. This is just plain frustrating. It might work if you read it all in one go on a beach, but I didn't. I read a little each evening and I very quickly got tired of trying to keep track, and gave up and went with the flow... skipping a lot just to get to the end to find the resolution.The other problem is that the book lacks big tense scenes of the kind that a good thriller needs - think Jack Reacher going into battle at the end of a Lee Child book. Chris Pavone seems unable to hit these heights, and I can't help thinking that he's tried to hide this deficiency with the convoluted narrative.If you do read it, when you get to the end think back through the major events and you'll see that there's a potentially great thriller here, but written in a single timeline from multiple viewpoints - loads of tension could have been extracted by letting the reader know more than the characters, with a lot of excitement to be had watching these people car crash into disaster.Or not. And boy don't get me started on that ending, what a let-down... but I won't spoil it for you, just in case I haven't put you off!

I've just finished reading The Expats by Chris Pavone. I thoroughly enjoyed the book from the beginning although there were a couple of niggles along the way.I thought that the plot was strong, with quite a few twists and turns, although I found it far from believable (I don't want to give anything away). To think that Kate could have hid her past from her husband for so long is just unbelievable, and I found some other things a little bit farfetched. But nevertheless it was an enjoyable read.The book is written form Kate's point of view, and it works well, and Pavone writes well in a manner that is easy to read. I assume that Pavone is an American as this book has a very paranoid American way about it.As other reviewers have noted, the narration jumps around quite a bit which can be hard to follow, especially on the Kindle edition where it isn't so easy to flick back a few pages and find out where the current section is set.I found the ending a tad disappointing that Kate would let events happen the way they did, but other than that it was an enjoyable read, if far form the best book I've ever read.

The author has some understanding of Europe although he does tend to see it as one big country. He seems to have a detailed knowledge of Luxembourg where most of the story is based. Unfortunately, he makes a few comments, such as about the Battle of the Bulge and the Normandy invasion of Europe that are really crass. If people set their stories in different countries than their own, they should at least make an effort with their research. It is this lack of research that makes this story fall well short of some of the greats like John le Carre.The story itself is a little far fetched with the wife having led a secret life in the CIA. Her husband masterminds an internet fraud and two CIA agents appear throughout. The wife, Kate, also uses her old CIA contacts. The story is slow moving, with little suspense because the fear of the secrets being discovered just does not exist. It is simply too nice a story.That said, it swans along enough to keep you interested, there is a big twist at the end which you won't see coming even if you read the last few pages.Overall, an untaxing, enjoyable read that may have scraped 4 stars had it been better researched. Read it if you want something to read as you unwind at the end of the day.

First of all the good points. I bought this when it was on special offer, Kindle deal of the day. I was pleased to see it as I'd just read a review of it in the Observer which was very positive. I also was very much into spy stories at the time, having just re-watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (the tv series from the seventies with Alec Guinness)and just starting to watch Homeland on Channel 4. So it was straight into the basket with it.Kate is an ex CIA operative who has moved to Luxembourg because of her husband's job. She starts to make friends in the expat community but soon becomes very suspicious of one couple, Julia and Bill. At first she thinks that they are spying on her; Kate has a very dark secret in her past but when she starts to investigate the couple with the help of an old CIA friend (who doesn't have one of those? very useful I find) discovers that it's someone else entirely that they watching. Her husband, Bill, is suspected of stealing 50,000,000 dollarsThis is a readable novel on the whole although there are caveats. There is an awful lot of ruminating and soul searching in this book which is a little tiresome. Kate examining her conscience about her past isn't awfully interesting but her endlessly asking herself whether her husband could steal that amount of money is plain boring. The novel needed a good editor to go through and delete these repetitions. I also wasn't sure about some of the details. Kate and Dexter move about Europe a lot but you never really get a sense of where they are. Paris could be Luxembourg could be the south of France could be Geneva. They all merge into one great blur. At one point the couple pay 45 euros for a day's parking permit in Amsterdam. I know parking's expensive - but 45 euros! A niggly point I know but the devil is in the detail!Would I recommend it? Yes, on the whole I would especially if you like thrillers. I was expecting more after the good review I'd read so I was a little disappointed.

This is an enormously complicated novel, and the author is to be congratulated for keeping up with what he was writing! There must have been times when he felt he was in a maze, wondering what the next turn would be and trying to remember where he'd been before!From a reader's point of view..and this point has been raised by other reviewers..the hardest thing to cope with was the constant moving from past to present, from location to location. It really was difficult to keep up with, and there were times when I was tempted to give up because, frankly, the book was proving too much like hard work!But I suppose I'm glad I did persevere. The ending..very Hercule Poirot-esque with all those involved gathered together whilst the super-spy reveals how she worked out the truth..was carefully constructed and surprisingly, given all the complexities of the plot, perfectly logical and not contradicted by any of the foregoing events in the story.If your taste runs to fast moving, exciting reads as with Vince Flynn, Lee Child et al, then this one is probably too complex for you to fully enjoy. For me, it was interesting, challenging but possibly not the style that gives me the most enjoyment.I guess I'm a simple soul!

Great read. I feel the flashbacks added to the story, feeding you important backstory while keeping you turning the pages with revealing bits of what's to come. Basically there's three main time streams; today in Paris which is where the final scenes are played slowly in time stamped paragraphs throughout the book; there is the preceeding two years that lead up to this day in Paris which form the bulk of the narrative; then there are flashbacks to Kate's CIA work. It can occasionally get confusing but not in a way that ruins the story and mostly you don't need to know exactly when things happen to 'get it'. The plot is complex and well thought through with no obvious plot holes although there are a few times you have to suspend belief, not least with the comic book mom/CIA agent dilemma. As a mom I did struggle with Kate's parenting, one minute her children are super important and the next they are nowhere to be seen, presumably looked after by an unknown sitter while important stuff goes down. Equally the amount of stuff she gets done in the 6 hours her kids are at school is a tad unbelieveable. However without the mom/CIA agent hook it is just another story of spouses with secrets and lies and I admit the children and their safety do add a believable motivation for some of what happens. I didn't give it 5 stars because I felt the characters were a bit underdeveloped, yes they all have interesting back stories but this doesn't make them more than 2D 'names with interesting back stories' . In fairness this is common with this genre. I also found the ending, while being full of twists and revelations was a bit Agatha Christie in that the ending primarily involved characters explaining and telling rarther than scenes showing what had really been going on in the previous 300 pages. This was a bit of a disappointment if I'm honest but for it's genre it is a very good book..... And a steal at 20p.

I thought a bit about how I could review this novel without giving too much away to the prospective reader. I concluded that, really I couldn't back up much of what I say with examples from the book as they would, in effect be what people call nowadays, spoilers. So don't expect to see any here, just believe!This story is a gripping thriller where nothing or nobody is what it or they seem. As the characters develop, flaws and mistakes appear that gives Kate, the protagonist clues that people aren't what they purport to be, but it isn't until much later that their real identities and purposes are revealed. Or are they? Even Kate, it transpires has some secrets.This is a genuine page turner, which more than once, causes you to sit up and think "did I just read that?" causing you to re-read the paragraph in question again with surprise at some revelation to check you read it right.The characters are well developed. There's tension in circumstances and between characters, friendships are developed and fall apart and trusted spouses appear not to be as thought previously. The descriptions of the various places are brought alive and you can take in the atmosphere.As you can see, there's a lot going on in this book. There really aren't any slow passages.As you can tell, I enjoyed it. So, I expect, will you.