by Cathryn Conroy (Dublin, Ohio): This is a slow-building suspenseful thriller that soon threatens to boil over in a pressure-cooker plot that will keep you up way past your bedtime.
Written by Chris Pavone, this is the story of the Bohemia, a posh apartment building on New York City’s Upper West Side that is so exclusive and private that it doesn’t even have a street address on the outside of the building. We follow the stories of the doorman and the residents in two apartments, and those stories are filled with lust and love, sex and violence, intrigue and murder.
The background of the plot that soon takes centerstage is ripped from today’s headlines: In separate incidents days apart, White police officers have brutally murdered two Black men, setting the city on edge. Protesters, including hordes of angry MAGA supporters in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags, are gathering in multiple places in New York City. It’s a powder keg that is ready to explode.
This isn’t your typical thriller. It’s also a story about the political state of our big U.S. cities with all our prejudices and fury about racial and economic disparities on full display.
The characters around which the novel revolves are: • The head doorman is Chicky Diaz, a middle-aged man who has recently lost his beloved wife to cancer and owes lots of money to loan sharks, his landlord, and his credit card companies. He’s never done this before, but the circumstances are dire. Chicky is packing a gun while on the job as the Bohemia doorman.
• Emily Merriweather Longworth and Whitaker Hamilton Longword live in the penthouse. Whit’s obscene wealth, built through nefarious means, is almost as enormous as his ego. He has developed some weird sexual proclivities, but that is only one of Emily’s problems. She hates her husband, but she knows she can’t leave him with that iron-clad, unbreakable prenup she signed. Meanwhile, in addition to regularly volunteering in a Harlem food pantry, she is having an affair that could cost her everything—including her life or her lover’s.
• Jennifer and Julian Sonnenberg live on the second floor in a modest apartment. She is a high-powered attorney, while he owns an art gallery with his best friend, Ellington, a gay Black man. While he’s dealing with a potential lawsuit that could bankrupt his business, Julian has also received some somber and frightening news from his doctor.
The ending is an action-packed page-turner that is, at first, surprising and then shocking…and then disturbing once it all sinks in.
Written in a lively, narrative style with a big and bold multilayered plot and chapter-ending cliffhangers, this is a captivating novel packed with surprises and simmering tension.
