The Accident

by Chris Pavone

[viking2917]

The Accident is Chris Pavone's followup to his surprise bestseller The ExPats. While there is some character overlap (our redoubtable heroine Kate from The ExPats makes her appearance), the focus is mostly elsewhere.

Isabel Reed, a fading star in the publishing firmament, receives a mysterious manuscript with explosive revelations about a famous media mogul. Pretty soon people are dying, and well, you know the drill. Que the car chases, the narrow escapes, the romantic encounter with the old friend, the mysterious reappearance of people from the past, the deaths, the explosions, .... you get it. It's truth in advertising here, a very decent beach read (which is where I read it). But not, I'm afraid, much more than that.

Much of the Accident is very well done. The plotting is solid, never really becomes too unbelievable, and regularly features a few surprising twists, the prose glides easily over the brain...and yet. The third time a character mysteriously forgets something at their office/home, retraces their steps only to be confronted by a bad guy looking for something, it started to get a bit too formulaic for me. Once, ok. twice, ok? Third time, dig harder for a new plot device next time. I also found the profusion of unnamed characters in the first few chapters more irritating and confusing than mysterious. Isabel is well rendered, as a publishing professional reaching middle age and starting to lose the passion, but the rest of the characters felt a bit too by-the-book for me. By way of contrast, in the Ex Pats, Kate is a wonderfully drawn character, complete with warts, confusion, secrets from her husband, and torn between her secret life as an agent and her simple life as a mother.

Speaking of publishing, The Accident is also a sort of love song to the publishing industry. Pavone spends a lot of time both in the novel, the forward and the credits, praising the real and imagined characters that populate the industry. As Pavone is a former publishing house employee, that's not surprising, and he seems to have followed the well-trodden path of publishing industry insider to someone with a book contract. I'm curious what % of authors with contracts worked in publishing first, as compared to Indie Authors.

While it's totally an unfair contrast, as I was reading The Accident I was also reading A Perfect Spy by LeCarre, one of the best spy novels (perhaps any novel) written this century, and clearly The Accident is a "genre" book and A Perfect Spy is a work of art. While it's hard going, you'll never understand a character better, and why they might betray everything they ever loved, by reading A Perfect Spy. Apples and Oranges I guess.

If you want a quick, solid, beach book, The Accident will do nicely. Or, you could invest your time in something amazing like A Perfect Spy (be forewarned, reading A Perfect Spy is work, with an amazing reward, not a quick beach read).

I received a copy of The Accident via the wonderful LibraryThing early reviewers program.