The Doorman

Pavone trades his usual globe-trotting espionage for a single Manhattan address, and the confinement suits him. Chicky Diaz, the ex-Marine doorman at the center of it, is drawn with a specificity — the memorized names, the practiced deference, the private contempt simmering underneath — that critics have compared, credibly, to Tom Wolfe's dissections of New York class friction, minus Wolfe's sneer. The novel works simultaneously as a plot machine, with a marriage curdling and a heist gathering offstage, and as social observation about wealth, race, and the invisible labor that keeps luxury buildings running. It's busier than it needs to be in places, but the voice, sardonic, humane, alert to absurdity on both sides of the lobby door, carries it.