Two Nights in Lisbon

Chris Pavone

It’s 7:28 a.m. in Lisbon. Newlywed Ariel Pryce wakes up in her hotel. Alone. An empty space where her new husband should be. Groggy from the night before — from jet lag, wine, food, sex, a sleeping pill — she now also feels a flicker of panic. Where is John?

When calls and texts go unanswered, she ventures to the hotel’s breakfast room. Nothing. Worked into a lather of worry, she climbs the hierarchy of the authorities — first, hotel security, then the local police, and finally, the American embassy. But at each step on that ladder, there are questions she can’t answer. What exactly is the business that brought her husband to Lisbon? Why did she come along on a work trip? Why is she pressing the panic button so soon; couldn’t he just be having a dalliance with another woman? After all, her handsome new husband is much younger than she is, no?

Author Chris Pavone specializes in intelligent thrillers that flirt with the tropes of spy novels. His work draws comparisons to old-school espionage writers like Ken Follet, Frederick Forsyth, and Robert Ludlum. But though his plots hum along, they’re also deep dives into conflicted, complex characters — often expats — who wrestle with issues of identity and trust. Set in Paris, Copenhagen, Zurich, Luxembourg, Argentina, and Iceland, they always have a very strong sense of place.

This one starts as a thriller, morphs into a spy novel-slash-police procedural, and then pokes at emotionally painful places. As the story unwinds, we learn more about Ariel: who she was before she married her husband and a thing that happened to her. She becomes less opaque and less of the stereotypical woman-in-peril she seemed in the beginning. In that first scene in the hotel, she comes across as a not wholly reliable narrator, maybe a little off-putting. But stick around — because you will fall hard for Ariel and her badassery.

Without hitting you over the head with it, this story pokes around in the painful places of class stratification, violence against women, and the thornier side of mother-daughter relationships.

If you enjoy books like the Morocco-set The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida or Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, you’ll want to get your hands on this one. The plot twists and climbs like the alleys of Lisbon’s Alfama district: outrageous, tautly told, and with an ending that will stay with you long after you read the last line.

The praça is to the south. Ariel heads north, up the steep slope of Bairro Alto, through the narrow streets strung with party lights and laundry lines, dish towels and soccer jerseys flapping above clusters of tables in front of cervejarias and tabernas, hole-in-the-wall convenience stores, boutiques selling sneakers, sardines, a mind-boggling array of items made from cork. It’s Monday morning. The city is coming to life quicker than it had over the weekend, with stores opening and cafés filling, with people strolling to work on sidewalks made of mosaics, leafy trees everywhere, walls graffitied with names and initials and peace signs and big toothy smiles and cartoon dogs. No guns, no RIP notices, no gangster signifiers. Lisbon’s graffiti is a reflection of exuberance, not despair. — Chris Pavone

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