Talking with LI's Chris Pavone

Five years ago, for his latest thriller, “Two Nights in Lisbon” (MCD, $28), author Chris Pavone set out to capture the eponymous city on paper. The sights, sounds, tastes and scents he noted on location may send readers packing off to Lisbon.

But in writing the book, Pavone was after more than a colorful, action-filled travelogue. His plot emanates from a brutal sexual assault on a woman that takes place as A-listers party in the Hamptons.

Pavone recently took time out from writing at his North Fork home to talk about his book’s setting and its urgent themes.

Do you find the North Fork a good place to write?

I do. I have a space in my attic that’s far away from my children and my dog. I go there sometimes. And I write on my porch sometimes, as I’m doing now. But I’m a writer who needs to get out of the house. So I tend to go to coffee shops in Greenport or Southold. There are a good number of people here who work in publishing — editors and agents and writers — it’s a vigorous writing community. I’m lucky to live surrounded by people who know my work. It’s a lot less lonely.

Are far-flung locations central to your novels?

Authors need to figure out what they’ll be known for, for what they can do better than other writers. I decided that I wanted to be known for work that transports people to another place. COVID has made travel for work difficult. My next book may take place in New York City.

How did you hit upon Lisbon as the setting for this book?

Everyone knows what Paris looks like, even smells like — even people who haven’t been to Paris do. I wanted to take readers to a place they may not have been to before. Lisbon is such a spectacular place and it’s filled with great locations.

Besides offering suspense, your book deals with pressing social issues. What led you to this blend of action and commentary?

In the 1990s, when I started to work in publishing, I had a small role in working on John Grisham’s thrillers. These legal thrillers were fantastic, page-turning puzzles that also happened to be about important issues affecting society. The thrills were not grafted onto ideas, nor were the ideas grafted onto thrills. That opened my eyes to writing a thriller that could also be about something relevant to us.

And so the book was a way of dealing with these issues.

A lot of people have felt compelled to take action in the wake of increasing evidence of problems in our society. I don’t have signs in my yard, I don’t have bumper stickers, I don’t wear T-shirts and confrontational ball caps with political slogans. What I do is write novels. I felt compelled to write something that was more relevant than what I’d been writing before.

How are readers responding to the ideas in the book particularly the subject of how sexual assault is dealt with?

Some people are reaching out to let me know they don’t appreciate Donald Trump being run down in the way that I have. But mostly others — and mostly women — are expressing their satisfaction that a man could write about the subject of sexual assault from a woman’s point of view.