{ "item_title" : "The Doorman", "item_author" : [" Chris Pavone "], "item_description" : "Named one of the Best Thrillers and a Notable Book of 2025 by the New York TimesA pulse-pounding novel of class, privilege, sex, and murder, from the New York Times bestselling author of Two Nights in Lisbon and The Expats.Chicky Diaz is everyone's favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York's cultural elite.Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she'd quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can't bring herself to leave him. Yet. And downstairs in 2A, Julian Sonnenberg--who has carved himself a successful niche in the art world, and led a good half-century of a full and satisfying, cosmopolitan life--has just received a devastating phone call that does nothing at all to alleviate his sense that, probably for better and worse, he has aged out and he's just not that useful to anyone any more. Meanwhile, gathered in the Bohemia's bowels, the building's almost entirely Black and Hispanic, working-class staff is taking in the news that that just a few miles uptown, a Black man has been killed by the police, leading to a demonstration, a counterdemonstration, and a long night of violence across the tinderbox city. As Chicky changes into his uniform for tonight's shift, he finds himself breaking a cardinal rule of the job: tonight, he'll be carrying a gun, bought only hours earlier, but before he knew of the pandemonium taking over the city. Chicky knows that there's more going on in his patch of sidewalk in front of the Bohemia than anyone's aware of. Tonight in the city, enemies will clash, loyalties will be tested, secrets will be revealed--and lives will be lost.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/460/479/0374604797_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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Taxi hailer, package handler, bouncer, greeting dispenser, secret keeper . . . Chicky Diaz wears a multitude of hats beneath his bell crown cap as he patrols the “little patch of earth” outside the Bohemia Apartments. But all is not well in the city today, and he’s going to need more than his calm demeanor and understated charm to protect the building’s well-heeled residents. Today, he’s going to need a gun.

Chris Pavone, New York Times-bestselling author of jet-setting thrillers including The Expats and Two Nights in Lisbon, sticks close to home in his sixth novel, The Doorman, set in New York City’s posh Central Park West. At the novel’s outset, the city is on tenterhooks after the cops have fatally shot an unarmed Black man, leading to street protests. This makes it a particularly bad time for one of the Bohemia’s megarich residents, Whit Longworth, to find his fortune-building past as a war profiteer in the media spotlight.

On the homefront, Whit’s wife, Emily, is poised at the edge of cancellation, as her liberal cohorts in nonprofit charity circles now see her husband’s business as radioactive. While she is furious with Whit for putting her in this bind, her marriage’s ironclad prenup has handcuffed Emily to him, at least for the immediate future.

Meanwhile, several floors down, gallerist Julian Sonnenberg finds himself equally trapped in a failing marriage, with his heart under assault, both figuratively by his infatuation with Mrs. Longworth and literally by a failing valve that could cost him his life if put under any additional strain. And strain is out there by the bucket load, as Chicky tries to navigate around his criminal-adjacent extended family, associates of which would like nothing more than to compel the doorman to be the linchpin for a robbery at the very apartments it’s his job to protect.

While formulaic “MAGA vs. woke” tropes scattered throughout tend to flatten his characters’ three-dimensionality, Pavone proves to be a master of deception, keeping the reader guessing the direction from which violence may come. When it inevitably does, it arrives as Hemingway’s famously described bankruptcy from The Sun Also Rises: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Breathtakingly, in fact.