My Readers Guide for The Doorman discusses that this book was NOT what I was expecting at all, but I liked it. Not everyone agrees, but I love discussing a divisive book and helping other readers figure out whether THEY will love it. This post will have spoilers and the ending explained. Let’s do this!
Readers Guide for The Doorman by Chris Pavone
Table of Contents for my Readers Guide for the Doorman:
- Jen’s Quick Take on The Doorman by Chris Pavone
- Spoilers for The Doorman and The Ending Explained
- Bonus: my original photos!
Jen’s Quick Take on The Doorman by Chris Pavone
- The Doorman is by Chris Pavone, who in the past has written international intrigue-style suspense, books like Two Nights in Lisbon.
- The Doorman is QUITE different from that book. It’s a very slow burn, very character-driven story about the residents of the Bohemia, a fancy building on Central Park West.
- The title character is Chicky, the doorman at the Bohemia. If you (like me) have a doorman, you will know that he or she might know more about you than anyone. The doormen see your mail, your visitors. They might know how much you fight with your spouse and whether you’re really employed or just eating five cartons of ice cream every day while watching Netflix.
- So you’re thinking: Jen! There’s a murder and the doorman solves it? NO.
- The Doorman is a very anthropological look at 2020s New York life from the perspective of three characters: Chicky, Emily (a trophy wife) and Julian (an art dealer).
- You can feel that the book is moving toward some sort of explosive conflict, White Lotus Style, and you do get clues, White Lotus style, but all of the action takes place in the last few chapters.
- I’ve seen it compared to Bonfire of the Vanities, and that is exactly what I thought as I read it. It has that feel. I really liked it but it is NOT really a thriller or a mystery at all.
- Publication date: May 20, 2025 by Farrar Strauss and Giroux. Thanks to the publisher for this advance review copy!
Spoilers for The Doorman and The Ending Explained
Backstory:
Uber-rich Upper West Side wife Emily Longworth is disenchanted with her life and horrified by her husband’s business. Whit Longworth’s company, Liberty Logistics, is a defense contractor that made a fortune selling weapons and body armor to anyone who will pay. Whit also likes to choke Emily during sex. This would all make a normal person flee, but Emily’s a bird in a solid gold cage.
Emily gets a secret painting studio (she dreamed of being an artist) and begins an affair with her neighbor, art dealer Julian Sonnenberg. They both live in the Bohemia, a famous apartment building on the Upper West Side.
Bohemia doorman Chicky Diaz is moonlighting at a hotel to help pay his late wife’s medical debts. This hotel is also where Whit meets prostitutes wearing dark wigs (Emily has dark hair) and chokes them during sex. Chicky is alarmed.
Chicky seems so obviously concerned about Emily’s well being that she figures out he’s hiding something and gets him to tell her. In his other moonlighting job as a bouncer, Chicky also got on the wrong side of a local gang leader who is threatening him, so Chicky illegally buys a gun.
At the time of the story, New York City is also reeling from the aftermath of a police shooting, and protests are springing up over the city.
THE NIGHT IT ALL GOES DOWN
Items in italics are FLASHBACKS
At an Emerging Artists Fund gala, Julian’s wife clearly realizes that Emily and Julian are sleeping together.
The night of the gala coincides with a huge protest over an incident in which a Black man was shot fleeing the police, one that Emily(coincidentally) witnessed as she left her volunteer job in Harlem.
At the gala, Whit gets drunk and belligerent. The gala is to honor artists of color and Whit makes racist remarks to other guests.
Emily leaves the gala alone and goes to the East Side to check on her parents, who are babysitting her kids and alarmed by the protests. Some white counter-protestors confront and injure Emily and her bodyguard. Whit heads back to the Bohemia alone.
Meanwhile at the Bohemia
That night, Chicky is on duty when a heavily armed group of men uses the protest as a distraction to target the apartments of the three richest residents in the Bohemia, one of them the Longworth’s. The gunmen take Chicky with them and force him to help them identify the apartments they want to rob. Chicky suggests they start with the Frumms, where they steal some art.
The gunmen, with Chicky in tow, arrive at the Longworth’s apartment, where the gunman ask if Longworth is home. Chicky says yes and they go inside.
While Emily is at her parents, Julian notices the armed men get out of an SUV and enter the Bohemia. He notifies the building manager, Olek.
Julian calls the police, then he and Olek head upstairs to the Longworth apartment. Olek has a gun and Julian has a large wrench.
Emily arrives home and a man she recognizes grabs her and yells to Whit Longworth that he has his wife and will shoot her.
Julian hears Emily scream. He and Olek rush in. Both are shot, but Olek manages to shoot one of the gunmen. Emily drops to her knees, sobbing.
Whit Longworth appears. He looks unharmed and Chicky realizes he must be wearing body armor.
Aftermath of the night
The next day Emily tells her lawyer, Aronsky, that the head gunman was Justin Pugh, a disgruntled former business associate of her husband’s. Whit had a falling out with Pugh (over his involvement with mercenaries. Whit cut Pugh off and now Pugh’s company is nearly bankrupt. Emily also learns that Whit called Julian the morning of the gala/protests/murders, which makes her nervous.
We learn that Emily was the one who leaked damaging information about Whit’s company and clients, that included authoritarian regimes and terrorists, to the media.
Aronsky asks Emily why her husband’s firearm was unloaded. She says she has no idea, but we learn that she had checked the safe where Whit has promised he’d keep his gun, and it wasn’t there. She was furious to find it loaded and in his bedside table, where her children might find it.
Emily Googles how to load and unload a handgun.
Police question Chicky and he hopes he and Emily can keep their stories straight.
After Julian and Olek were shot, Chicky saw movement in the hall. He assumed it was a gunman and that Whit was already dead. Chicky realizes he was shot in the melee.
But the person Chicky saw WAS Whit, who asked Emily why his gun was unloaded. Whit asks her if she set the robbery up. Chicky considers picking up the loaded gun that the dead robber had been holding, but decides against it.
Whit tells Emily that he knew about her affair, and she shoots him in the neck. (Did she know about the body armor?)
Chicky tells Emily that she has to make sure Whit is dead. Will she shoot him again or should he?
Emily and Jennifer go to Julian’s memorial service together.
Olek, who has recovered, visits Chicky in the hospital. He tells Chicky he heard and saw the whole thing, but won’t say anything. Chicky pays off the loan shark.
What Really Happened?
In a flashback, we see Emily calling the police. After she hangs up, an injured Chicky tells her they need to get their stories straight: they must say that the dead robber shot Whit twice. Chicky tells her to wash her hands before the police get there. He tells Emily that he will have to say that Whit tried to fire back at the shooters, but that gun was unloaded.
Emily’s security guy, DeMarquis, shows her a photo of Julian visiting her painting studio, where they conducted their affair. DeMarquis says Whit asked him to follow Emily but that he destroyed all the photos. (This explains why Whit was so belligerent at the gala.)
We learn that Emily was the one who shot Whit the second time. She opens a secret bank about for Chicky and deposit $10 million as a thank you.
I just finished this book and while I really enjoyed it, I think it being marketed as a mystery/thriller is possibly a mistake? I think so many people are going to jump in with an expectation that doesn’t see fruition, and the big action being at the very end is a long time to wait if you go in with the mystery/thriller assumption. Having said that, I genuinely enjoyed it (albeit at a certain point maybe there were just a wee too many times we were reminded of the evils of privilege/money?) for what it is, a book about life for the haves and have nots in New York City, with all that entails such as issues of race, class, money and within the context of kindnesses, hatreds, beauty, and ugliness, too. I will recommend this to friends, but with this caveat – don’t expect a mystery/thriller in the typical sense but rather a very strong book of fiction.
Hi Nicki! I agree with you. On Goodreads the publisher’s synopsis calls it a “a finely honed thriller of ticking-clock suspense.”
You do feel like something dramatic is going to happen but I think calling it a suspense novel is a bit of a stretch. Fiction with suspense elements?
Since all his books I’m aware of have leaned toward political thrillers that is what I expected. I like when authors try something new, but I agree with you that it’s important that readers go in with the right expectations!
I enjoyed this book very much and your review.
Thanks! I’m glad others are enjoying it even though it’s a bit different!
I saw hints of Bonfire of the Vanities in The Doorman, too. Bravo, you!
Bravo to us!
Besides Bonfire, I saw some of Woody Allen’s movie Alice in it.
Thanks for the run-down of the end. I thought I had it figured out and you confirmed my impressions. Parallels to Bonfire are spot on. What’s interesting here is (a) how much things have changed and still stayed the same. And (b) what a great writer Pavone is. So many passages that are both sociologically astute (not so hard to do) and so well-written they are like poetry (very hard to do). I’m normally not a big poetry person but this makes you shake your head as you admire how perfect and perfectly insightful and perfectly rhythmic it is.
I loved this book! I feel like it’s a bit out of his usual lane AND not really a suspense book so I feel like it’s not getting the praise it deserves. We’ll see when then end of year “best of” lists come out!
It was on some best of and noted book lists.
Yes, I was happy to see that when the end of the year rolled around!
Why were Emily’s fingerprints not on the gun with which she shot Whit?
Hi Colette!
I am not an expert on guns or fingerprint analysis. My understanding of all the shooting was that:
1. Chicky shot one of the armed robbers and after that guy was dead, Chicky kicked the robber’s gun away.
2. Emily then used that gun to shoot Whit once in the neck (as he’s wearing body armor)
3. Chicky picks up the gun Emily used (to explain the gunshot residue on own his hands from shooting 1 above).
4. When Chicky realizes Whit might survive, he asks Emily if he should shoot Whit again (or if she wants to).
5. We later find out that she did it herself.
But Chicky tells Emily to change the order of the narrative for the police: armed robber shot Julian, then Whit, then Chicky shot the armed robber with his Magnum.
All I can guess is that gun (which was used to kill Julian and Whit) had at least three people’s prints on it (the robber’s, Emily’s, and Chicky’s) plus blood. After Whit is dead, Chicky picks the gun up and puts it in his pocket. Maybe that was to obscure fingerprints? If the gun were wiped clean, that would be suspicious but I guess Chicky could have put the dead man’s prints on it. Then again, Chicky was bleeding and about to faint.
Thanks for your reply, Jen. Yes, that was also my general understanding of the sequence but I think that the possible presence of Emily’s prints on the gun should have been addressed, if only to have it dismissed in the course of the investigation. The failure to even address it left me dangling, with a loose end (the only one in an otherwise interesting read) not being tied up.
Completely agree. I understand this isn’t meant to be a procedural and that the police were on the way, so there wasn’t much time. Chicky tells her to wash her hands but she could have remembered shooting Whit, then wiping the gun and putting the gunman’s prints on it.
What happened to Pugh and surviving accomplices?
Great question, but I don’t think the book says. Emily tells the police that Pugh was among the intruders, but I think that’s all we get. If anyone thinks I missed something, please let me know!
Seems like a big hole, not describing their escape nor demise, no?
I agree.
The book had to end somewhere. Not all questions are answered in quite a few such books, but we can generally assume what happened to Pugh. There seemed to be no indication he realized Jen recognized him, primarily from his voice. His plans weren’t perfect, obviously.