Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon, alone. Her husband is gone―no warning, no note, not answering his phone. The clock is ticking. Ariel is increasingly frustrated and desperate, running out of time, and the one person in the world who can help is the one person she least wants to ask.
With each new effort, Pavone’s novelty value has diminished ... Pavone’s latest protagonist, Ariel Pryce, is so fretful and talky ... Pavone still has game. He’ll dupe any reader who takes the plot of Two Nights in Lisbon at face value ... In a maneuver that tangles his book significantly, Pavone gives it a time span much longer than the 'two nights' of the title ... Pavone risks whipsawing the reader as he springs surprise after surprise about how these two got to Portugal and what they were really up to. And he trots out a villainous character from an earlier book to cast a shadow over this one, which feels like recycling ... Two Nights in Lisbon strays so far from its original setup that it feels like more than one book ... Pavone ratchets up his story to create impossibly high stakes. There is contemporary political resonance in the real story he’s telling ... Ariel has experienced victimhood throughout her multiple lives, and the author has trouble balancing her obvious strength with her history of having been exploited. You could argue that this matters to the book’s denouement or just deem it hard to buy ... He is setting up a whopper of an ending, one that may be too much for even his most devoted readers, who have had to grapple with the implausible before ... Although Pavone fans may find Two Nights in Lisbon quite a stretch, this smart, calculating author remains many notches above others in his field. He is worldly and inviting when it comes to the book’s mostly European settings. His book captures a vacation’s escapism even as its heroine feels walls closing in. And his smaller scenes, like those set in Ariel’s bookstore, feel much less forced than his high-stakes ones.
Only Pavone knows their secrets, and he reveals them slowly and deliberately, expertly seeding the novel with intrigue and suspense, one page at a time ... the collision of both characters’ pasts and presents fuels the increasingly thrilling tension ... packed with stay-awake-all-night thrills for readers.
