The Doorman

A Novel

By: Chris Pavone

In the new novel from the bestselling author of Two Nights in Lisbon, a doorman at a luxury New York City apartment building is drawn into a web of intrigue, adultery, 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.

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

In the penthouse, Emily Longworth seems to lead a perfect life: perfect kids, perfect homes, perfect outfits, perfect profile of museum boards and charity work. And while Emily’s husband is perfectly wealthy, she has quietly loathed Whit since well before the recent revelations that he’s a profiteer. But their marriage came with an iron-clad prenup, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave. Yet.

In apartment 2A, there’s nothing perfect about Julian Sonnenberg’s morning. He’s already struggling with the mundane indignities of turning fifty, and now his doctor says he needs heart surgery, immediately. Things are falling apart, and awfully fast.

Down in the staff room, where the Bohemia’s working-class staff are all Black and Latino, word is spreading that the NYPD has killed an unarmed Black man and that the streets are filling with protestors. Upstairs, the residents panic about safety; downstairs, the guys are worried about survival—and justice. As Chicky dons his epauletted suit for tonight’s shift, he tucks a pistol into his waistband for the first time ever.

Someone, tonight, is going to die.

The Doorman, as The Bonfire of the Vanities did before it, presents a city poised to boil over. In what is far and 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 tock-clicking suspense. The Doorman is a book about class and privilege, about race and racism, principles and sacrifice, love and loyalty. And murder.

©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