The Doorman

A Novel

By: Chris Pavone

Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

In the new novel from the bestselling author of Two Nights in Lisbon, on the worst night in the greatest city on Earth, a doorman at the toniest address in town is drawn into a web of intrigue, robbery, and murder.

Chicky Diaz stands on his little patch of the earth, the clean quiet sidewalk in front of the Bohemia Apartments, thinking: there sure are a lot of great places to kill someone in this city.

Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, New York City’s world-famous home of celebrities, financiers, and the cultural elite.

Chicky serves at the pleasure of residents like Emily Longworth, who, up in her penthouse, leads a life of luxury: her perfect kids in her perfect home, her perfect worries about museum boards, charity work, and so on. Emily’s husband, though . . . perfectly wealthy, but she has quietly loathed Whit Longworth since well before the revelations that he’s a private-equity war profiteer. But their marriage came with an iron-clad prenup, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave all that. Yet.

Meanwhile, in apartment 2A, there’s nothing perfect about Julian Sonnenberg’s middle-aged life. Already struggling with the indignities of turning fifty—a stale marriage, teenage kids who no longer need him, his work as an art gallerist making him feel culturally obsolete—and now his doctor tells him that he needs openheart surgery, immediately. Things are falling apart awfully fast.

In the basement staff room, the life-and-death stakes of daily life are hardly news to the primarily Black and Latino hospitality. So when the NYPD fatally shoots an unarmed Black man and the streets swell with both protestors and counterprotestors, the staff’s concerns are less about the building and more about their survival—and what justice will look like.

Enter Chicky in his epauletted suit, manning the line between the turbulent streets outside the Bohemia and the far more sanguine world within. And not that the Bohemia’s residents care much (except maybe Emily Longworth), but Chicky has his own problems, the kind that mean that for tonight’s shift, for the first time in thirty years, Chicky will be carrying a gun. Because someone, tonight, is going to die.

In what is far away his best and most ambitious book yet, Chris Pavone has delivered a piercing portrait of the way we live now that is also a finely honed thriller of ticking-clock suspense. The Doorman is a book about class and privilege in a city poised to boil over its proverbial melting pot, and the ever starker divisions testing everything the City likes to believe about itself.

©2025 Chris Pavone (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“Smart, twisty, and sharply written, The Doorman is hard to put down and harder to forget. A delight.” —Karin Slaughter, New York Times and #1 international bestselling author of This is Why We Lied

“Like the New York City subway, Chris Pavone’s novel moves at breakneck speed, twisting and turning, jostling together those who might otherwise live worlds apart, intertwining their secrets, their private heartaches, and their fates as The Doorman hurdles to its shocking conclusion.” –Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street