The Accident (due March 11) more than lives up to the promise of Chris Pavone’s previous page-turner, The Expats. It’s dawn in Manhattan. Literary agent Isabel Reed has just read the last page of an astonishing manuscript by an anonymous author; as an old hand in the publishing industry, she knows just how explosive this exposé of a longtime media giant, and of the CIA, is going to be As we hurtle through a single day, darting from Isabel to her acquiring editor and his publisher, and from CIA agents to murders in New York, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles, snippets of the manuscript titillate us, carrying us—and Isabel—back in time to where the truth lies buried. That The Accident rings true is no accident—Pavone spent much of his adult life in the publishing business. His new title succeeds brilliantly as a mystery/thriller—fast-paced, intricate, sly, and sophisticated—and also as a novel of the book industry, and of corporate ambition and greed.
