Chris Pavone

Chris Pavone is an American thriller writer born in 1968 who spent nearly two decades working as a book editor in New York publishing before turning to fiction himself. He studied at Cornell University and lived for a time in Luxembourg with his family, an experience that directly shaped his 2012 debut, The Expats, about an American woman in Luxembourg whose husband and new social circle turn out to be hiding secrets of their own. The novel became a New York Times bestseller and won both the Edgar Award and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel in 2013.

Pavone followed it with The Accident (2014) and The Travelers (2016), both standalone thrillers, before returning to The Expats' Kate and Dexter Moore for a sequel, The Paris Diversion (2019), set entirely across a single tense day in Paris. His more recent novels, Two Nights in Lisbon (2022) and The Doorman (2025), continue his interest in tight timeframes and reveals that reframe everything a reader thought they understood about a story; The Doorman was named one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2025.

Pavone lives in New York City with his wife and two children.