The Expats

Chris Pavone began his career in publishing, working as a book editor and ghostwriter on several nonfiction titles. His shift to thriller writing came after his wife accepted a job offer that required their family to move from the US to Luxembourg, a clear influence on the premise for Pavone’s 2012 novel, The Expats. Pavone has cited the American novelists John Grisham and Pat Conroy as influences on his writing. Grisham’s prolific body of work helped Pavone realize the value of suspense fiction as a literary genre, while Conroy helped Pavone to derive his writing process from mere observation, attention, and curiosity.

Living abroad for the first time, Pavone devoted much of his free time to writing his first full-length manuscript. He drew directly from his experience and began writing a domestic drama, but he felt that it lacked propulsion. The project changed direction when he found himself speaking to an expatriate mother who seemed very secretive and guarded about her background (MacDonald, Jay. “Chris Pavone: The Secret Life of Mrs. Moore.” BookPage, Mar. 2012.) From there, he began to imagine the different kinds of secrets an expatriate could have and changed the gender of his