The Expats

The Expats (2012), a spy thriller by novelist Chris Pavone, concerns Kate Moore, a struggling working mom and former CIA agent who moves with her husband to Luxembourg to follow his career. Hoping that the job change will rejuvenate her marriage and relationship with her children, Moore also sees in the move an opportunity to quit living a double life concealing her past occupation. As Moore reinvents herself, learning the national languages and modeling herself anew after an ideal of the housewife, she finds the aspiration obsolete and boring. When another American couple comes to live in Luxembourg, Moore grows wary, believing that they are in some way related to her past as a spy. She launches into an investigation, discovering that her and her husband’s ordinary lives are illusory, founded on an unstable network of deceit and crime. Narrated from a third-person limited perspective, the novel moves between different intervals of time, branching off a single day in Paris after the family leaves Luxembourg.

The novel begins in Paris. As Moore reflects on the move, she rejoices in the thought that she might no longer have to remain tense about her past as an undercover CIA agent, which rendered her a target by underground criminal syndicates. As she drops her sons off at their new school, a woman approaches her. Though the woman wears sunglasses, Moore recognizes her voice and is instantly alarmed. They exchange an awkward hug and talk as if nothing is awry, until the woman asks where Moore lives. Moore agrees to meet the woman for dinner and bring her husband, Dexter, but asks for the woman’s number instead of giving out her own. The woman makes an obscure request that Moore tell her husband that the colonel is dead.

The novel jumps back to the family’s initial month in Luxembourg. They take their children out to dinner because they have yet to be fully settled at home. At dinner, Moore complains to Dexter that he has been too busy with work to pay attention to their kids. In response, Dexter becomes angry, justifying his career path as the rational best choice for the whole family.



Back in the present day, Moore remains unnerved about meeting the woman, believing her appearance is no coincidence. Unsure whether it is related to her past or Dexter’s, she makes a call on speed dial. The story flashes back to a trip Moore took to the Marais. At the time, she is finally beginning to accept that she is truly safe to tour a foreign place without the risk of being followed or attacked. She meets up with Dexter and the kids for lunch and runs into their new neighbors, Julia and her husband, Bill. They arrange for a babysitter to watch the children that night. They arrive at dinner tipsy and make pleasantries, especially Dexter, who is amazed at Bill’s skiing anecdotes.

Back in the present again, Moore has speed dialed Dexter. She tells him that she saw Julia, whom they had not encountered since two winters before. Moore relays that Julia and Bill wish to go to dinner; they decide on a restaurant where there are no hiding spots for people to attack from. Moore thinks about a remote safe house disguised as a farm where the family has hidden supplies and cash in case of an emergency. Relaying Julia’s message, she tells Dexter that the colonel is dead and hangs up.

Moore goes home and packs emergency bags for the family. Planning to leave Paris and accepting her family’s destabilization again, she reflects on whether it was a good decision to join the CIA after college. She stops packing suddenly and goes searching for Dexter’s yearbook, remembering a last name that ended with “owski.” She finds the senior photo of Julia, whom Dexter always claimed not to have known before meeting her and Bill in Europe.



The family goes off to Germany under the alibi of a short vacation. Moore spends much of the time wondering what Julia and Bill’s purpose is, hypothesizing that they might be targeting someone for assassination. After the trip, when Dexter comes home with champagne to celebrate having made tens of thousands of euros that day, Moore grows ever more suspicious of him and his relationship to Julia.

A few weeks later during the holidays, the Moores attend a party that includes Julia and Bill as guests. Moore breaks down, feeling disconnected from everyone, including Dexter. She cries in the restroom, lamenting the idea that she never truly knew him. She resolves to keep investigating Julia and Bill and includes her husband in the group of people up for question. Eventually, she gets Bill to admit that he knew Julia in college and that they conspired to receive money from an illegal arms trade and cyber crimes with Bill. Her real identity is Susan Pognowski.

Moore teams up with a CIA supervisor and they extract confessions from Bill and Susan. As a provision for helping, Moore requests that Dexter get immunity for the crimes. In a final plot twist, Moore lets them escape, and in a trade-off, keeps their stolen cash to help fund a new CIA operation somewhere in Europe. She decides to go back to work for the CIA, looking forward to finally balancing it with her family life. The Expats is thus ultimately about how familial relationships and the relationships that stem from covert operations are incompatible, but inevitably entangled in each other, and up to its maternal protagonist to resolve.