Kate Moore

About the Kate Moore series

Chris Pavone's debut, The Expats (2012), introduces Kate Moore, a former CIA operative who has told her husband Dexter she left a career in banking, not intelligence, when the family relocates to Luxembourg for his new job -- until she realizes Dexter is hiding a past of his own, and a couple who move into her small expat social circle turn out to be watching her. The novel won the Edgar Award and Anthony Award for Best First Novel and became a New York Times bestseller. The Paris Diversion (2019) picks the family up seven years later, relocated again to Paris, where Kate now runs a secret intelligence network of her own -- and the entire novel unfolds across a single tense twelve hours as a hostage crisis, a bomb threat, and a market-manipulation scheme all converge on the city at once.

Pavone, a longtime book editor before turning to fiction, built the series around the domestic texture of expatriate life -- the dinner parties, school runs, and social performances of Americans abroad -- as camouflage for a genuine espionage plot underneath, a structural trick he'd continue refining in his standalone novels.