I didn't know what I was in for when I started listening to the audiobook I received as an ARC from Netgalley. Needless to say it was quite the thriller! It is the first book I've read by Chris Pavone and I can guarantee it won't be my last.

The story is filled with twists and turns, ups and downs, as well as intrigue and chicanery. If you love a great thriller you need to give this one a go.

"Two Nights in Lisbon" is highly touted as a "riveting thriller about a woman under pressure, and how far she will go when everything is on the line." While that is true, it doesn't mention how long it takes to get through it. At more than 400 pages, your eyes are tired from reading or you zone out while listening to its 15 hours of narration.

I would give the plot 4 stars, but the length bumps it down to 3 stars.

As the audiobook plays, it jumps from Ariel Price and her now missing husband John Wright traveling to Lisbon, Portugal, to a story about a New York socialite who escapes to a farm with her son. When it turns out her husband has been kidnapped, the story jumps back to her past, her first husband and a mysterious man who could afford to pay the ransom.

Is John's abduction connected to Ariel's past when she went by a different name? Is there more to John than meets the eye? There's corruption, frustration and more than a few questions left unanswered. The backstory includes sexual assaults, a broken neck and being too pretty for her own good.

If you have the patience to follow the novel to its ending, its twists and turns will be revealed. It's a worthy conclusion to a complex story.

Unfortunately, the pace slows down considerably after an amazing start and my interest started lagging long before the story finally picks up again. It's an interesting story, but if it was shorter and less repetitive, it would be the fast-paced and tightly woven thriller as it was intended to be.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the early listen. Love January LaVoy as narrator. She does an amazing job narrating and giving each person their own voice. Really enjoyed reading/listening to this book. Held my attention until the end and I was somewhat surprised by the end. I did not guess the ending did guess the whodunnit.
Will recommend

Name of Book: Two Nights in Lisbon
Author: Chris Pavone
Genre: Suspense~ International Thriller
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Pub Date: May 24, 2022
My Rating: 4 Stars

This is my first Chris Pavone novel, I was actually drawn to this as I am a big audiobook fan but very particular about the narrator. When I saw January La Voy was the narrator I did a fist bump!💘

Ariel Price has been divorced for fifteen years; when that marriage ended, she left everything behind and said she was never going to trust anyone ever again.

Story starts in Lisbon, Portugal, where Ariel and her husband John Wright are there for a Business/Pleasure trip. Ariel wakes up and immediately discovers that her husband is not in not there, in fact nowhere to be seen. She approaches hotel authorities about her missing husband. They view the hotel security surveillance video and see that he was on the sidewalk outside the hotel that morning. Also looks as if a car stopped for him. Ariel is confused as he is not dressed for the business meeting he is scheduled to attend.
Ariel is obsessed about finding him, although she seems to know very little about him~ she doesn’t even know where he works?????

Story had me curious. But when it slows down and Ariel’s attitude and nasty mouthy became way too annoying. ~Ariel believes using profanity is ~ A part of life ~ People have a sense of entitlement to curse out anyone and everyone! ~ Ugh! I am such an old dinosaur I am not okay with that. 🤔
I was sure this was going to be a DNF for me.

However, the story did keep me curious ~ especially when Ariel’s secret past comes out
I hung in there and YES! So glad I did.🤗
I completely changed my opinion of this story.
Thank you author, Chris Pavone!
]
Want to thank NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this audio eGalley. This file has been made available to me before publication in an early form for an honest professional review. Publishing Release Date scheduled for May 24, 2022.

This was a very interesting ride and not at all what I expected. Loved how it turned out. Can't really say too much else without revealing plot points but I really liked it. Chris Pavone always delivers a great reading experience.

Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for an advance audiobook copy & the chance to review this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book moved wayyy too slow for me. If it was cut down by even 1/3 it likely would have held my interest more. I got about 70% of the way through it but ultimately DNF

I read this book on MacMillan audio courtesy of NetGalley. It is a suspense novel with Ariel Price accompanying her husband on a business trip when she wakes up on Day 1 to find her husband missing. This story caught my interest at the start but by the middle, it just meandered around with a lot of different characters investigating the husband's disappearance and various stories that were unraveled. It was hard to keep all the characters straight on the audio. There was jumping around with timelines and sometimes sentences that stopped mid sentence that also made the audio hard to follow as well as repetition of some plot points that made this book longer than needed. Ariel as a character is also hard to care about because of her perspectives and how she deals with other characters. The epilogue provided some twists but I found myself annoyed with it, especially the parts where she spoke with her son. *Please note trigger warnings for sexual assault

Two Nights in Lisbon is a slow burning story of international intrigue that will keep you guessing about what is going on until the very end. Ariel has accompanied her new husband John to Lisbon for a business trip when he is kidnapped, and a 3 million ransom is demanded. When it becomes obvious that Ariel has to come up with the ransom on her own, she is forced to confront someone from her past and extort him to help her. While she is incredibly careful to protect the identity of this supposedly powerful person, she has already aroused the suspicion of the Lisbon police and also of the CIA assigned to the Am. Embassy and is under surveillance by both. The Lisbon police think the kidnapping is some kind of elaborate hoax and the CIA are worried about a possible threat to national security. The one thing we do know from the beginning and which does not change even as the aftermath of the kidnapping plays out and surprising information is revealed from both Ariel and John’s past is that Ariel is one strong woman who is tired of powerful men who think they have the right to use woman and discard them, and who is tired of being told how a woman is supposed to act and most of all who is totally fed up with never really being listened to or believed.

An exciting story about a kidnapping in Lisbon, the CIA, high profile politicians and how influential people think they can get away with rape. Good pace, good book to listen to while travelling.

Now THIS is a suspense novel. Two Nights in Lisbon is fast-paced, exciting, and keeps you on the literal edge of your seat for the entire ride. Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon without her new husband anywhere in sight. She spends the next 48 hours frantically looking for him. This book is a guaranteed way to get anyone out of a reading slump.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this audiobook. The narrator was fantastic!

A fast-paced thriller with all kinds of twisty turns. It was hard to figure out if the narrator was credible, but I liked her so much I wanted to believe her. I liked the way the author planted little hints throughout the book--I want to read it again to pick up on what I missed! This would be a great book group discussion: there are characters, settings, plot devices, and lots of cultural references (the Me, Too movement, cancel culture, political power struggles) that would be fun to dissect.

The setting was atmospheric and increased the urgency. As Ariel tried to deal with everyone from the hotel concierge to the police and the American embassy, the desperation builds.

I really couldn't stop listening to it, I wanted to know what would happen next. The audio narrator strikes a great tone, she definitely added to the enjoyment.


Thank you NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for allowing me to rate and review this title.

I really enjoyed this audiobook!! Chris folds flashbacks into the current timeline so smoothly, adding to the story. It has a few tangents that were included just to add more tension that I didn't feel added to the story, but on audiobook it wasn't frustrating. I liked the voice of all of the characters and it was well paced.

I plan to look into Chris's back list to add to my TBR list!!

This was definitely an enjoyable book that was full of twists and turns. It’s a book that takes its readers upon a journey that’s unexpected. I will say that this book is rather long but it does incorporate much that adds to the mystery and intrigue. I really enjoyed that aspect and that it kept me in suspense. I wasn’t very fond of how the book ended, however. I guess I wanted just a little bit more.
With those things said, I would still recommend this book. Also, be warned, there are triggers of sexual violence/rape.
I would like to thank Netgalley, the publishers and Dreamscape media for this ARC audiobook in return for my honest and unbiased review.

Always glad to read the international intrigue of a new Chris Pavone book. Two Nights in Lisbon is his newest book.

"Ariel Price wakes up alone in her hotel room. Her husband is gone - no note, no message. The police don't believe her when she reports him missing. The embassy is unwilling to help. When the ransom call comes in she turns to the one place she knows for the money - a man she hoped never to speak to again. A secret from her past she hoped never to think of again. But this man is now immensely more powerful now...and the CIA takes an interest."

There are always layers to a Pavone novel. And he peels them back a little at a time. It's a bit of a slow build but there's always something happening. What looks like a simple kidnapping is not - but you don't know what's really going on. And it's happening in Lisbon, Portugal - a great city for international intrigue

The story goes from the kidnapping to the back story. There is an event at a party that is very tough to read. There are hints about who's involved. and just how powerful he is politically. You'll like how it ends.

A great audiobook performance from January Lavoy. This is a long audiobook and she moves seamlessly between the characters.

Another great story from Pavone.

How far would you go to find your significant other in a country that you don’t know anyone? It’s a great premise for a thriller. Pavone throws lots of curveballs and twists mixed with a lot of tension. Recommend for mystery/thriller fans.

I want to thank Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for providing an audiobook arc.

This was a slow burn thriller! Normally I don’t enjoy those too much but this one I listened to on audiobook had me hooked. It had lengthy chapters but the narrator did a great job!

Ariel Price begins freaking out when she wakes up in her hotel room in Lisbon to find her husband gone. She frantically goes to report him missing. First to the hotel security, then the police who don’t seem to believe a word out of her mouth, and finally the American embassy.

They all ask her questions that she can’t answer. She has no clue what her husband is doing on a business trip in Lisbon. Why did she have to go too?

Time is running out as Ariel really starts to panic. The only person she can turn to for help is someone she hoped she’d never have to ask.

Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for this arc in exchange for my honest review.

I really enjoyed this thriller. It was refreshing to read something that kept me guessing! I liked the narrator a lot … found the book to be very cleverly funny in places, and always interesting! Well done! Solid read I will happily recommend to my patrons.

Thanks to NetGalley & MacMillan Audio for providing an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I've been meaning to read Chris Pavone for awhile now; I like spy stories as much as the next person, and I'd heard good things. This one isn't exactly a spy story, although spies figure into it heavily, as do cops, reporters, embassies, you get the idea. It's about Americans in Lisbon, ostensibly on vacation (for her) and a business trip (for him). I've accompanied my own husband on trips like this, so it's definitely relatable; I sincerely hope my sweetie never gets kidnapped during a short stay in a foreign country.

Ariel is newly married to John, he of the weekend business trip in Lisbon. Ariel is in her middle forties and John is maybe a decade her junior, but they are both attractive people and have been married just a few months. They've known each other not quite a year, but still, Ariel knows something is terribly wrong when she wakes up in their hotel room and John is gone. She staves off her panic until several hours have gone by, but later that morning she visits the police, then the American Embassy, looking for help in finding her husband, after she has exhausted the resources of the hotel staff.

Other reviews have mentioned the length of the book; it's long, that's true. Four hundred-something pages, and I'll admit that it's a bit verbose, sure, but January LaVoy, the voice actor, is no slouch, and she makes the time pass easily. She does a nice job (to my untrained ears, anyway) with Portuguese accents, male timbre, even a slightly grating Southern accent and a teenaged whine. I never had any issues telling one voice from another, which is a triumph for any voice actor, as far as I'm concerned.

Soon, the CIA is involved, after the Embassy rep brings the tale of the possible kidnapping to them. Ariel wanders around Lisbon, and is followed, by cops, by CIA. There is much doubt on behalf of the parties involved, mostly because she reported the disappearance so early in the day, and because she is older than her husband. He was accosted by a woman who claimed to recognize him under another name in a local restaurant; maybe he's holed up with her somewhere? But Ariel knows better. It's not long before an anonymous motorcyclist roars up to her and hands her a burner phone, connected to a person asking for 3 million euros for John's return.

Ariel is a single mom with a run-down farm and a struggling independent bookstore; she doesn't have 3 million euros. She calls her ex-husband, Bucky, who she hasn't spoken to in 14 years. Bucky has money, but not 3M, so Ariel is forced to go back to a time when she was called Laurel, drove a new Range Rover, and "did lunch" with other similar women. Gradually, Pavone reveals Ariel's past, the trauma that led her to abandon that life, jump-cutting between current-day Lisbon and the Long Island of 15 years prior. Ariel contacts a man from that past, and extorts him into wiring her the money. There is a protracted depiction of emails from expensive lawyers, funds coming in from a corporation to cover the request, the vagaries of trying to move big money in a hurry over 4th of July holidays, NDAs and how they generally work. Eventually we arrive at the point where Ariel gives over the money (after working to lose the CIA tail) and gets John returned.

But we're not done yet! Lots more happens, and I guess at this point I did start wondering when we were going to be done. Pavone continually reveals more and more about the man who wired the 3 million (which ends up being 2 million bc of bank holiday issues) and how his past intersects with Ariel/Laurel's, but at this point there aren't many surprises except for the way it went down, and exactly how inextricable is Ariel's life and the life of her family from this man?

Pavone attempts to show a picture of a woman who has been objectified by men her entire life, and I suppose he succeeds, up to a certain point. It does seem like he did his homework wrt how *some* women act in the aftermath of assault/trauma. He does an OK job, but it's still evident that this is a female character written by a man, which is not such a big deal except that it feels like he's really trying to draw an accurate portrait of a woman in the aftermath of trauma. I'm probably being nitpicky, but for a "barnburner" thriller, there's a lot of quiet moments where this woman is examining her feelings around being female in the world. I'm not sure if this is a departure for Pavone or business as usual. It makes for a different sort of heroine (although I suspect that the actual heroine is supposed to be the principled female CIA operative working the case as it heats up).

Not bad, but I'm not in any big hurry to read the back catalog.

This thriller begins with an American couple visiting Lisbon, Portugal and jaunts across different timelines through flashbacks. Ariel Price wakes up to an empty Lisbon hotel room and her husband is missing with no explanation. It was quite an intriguing premise and started off strong, but in the middle slowed down quite a bit. There were a lot of moving parts that didn't seem cohesive, almost like it was at least two different books meshed together. It all came together in the end, but I think it could have been so much stronger if the story was more focused. It was entertaining nonetheless and I enjoyed it for the most part.

This story starts with the main character, Ariel, waking up in Lisbon to find that her husband is missing! With every second that passes, she becomes more and more worried and begins to question everything she knows...and doesn't know about her husband.

I don't want to say too much and give anything away, but I will say that this one surprised me! It was a fun and relatively fast-paced international/political suspense/mystery.

I was able to listen to the audio version thanks to Macmillan Audio and the narrator, January LaVoy did a wonderful job with this one, as she always does! This will be available for purchase on May 24th!

CW: Please be aware that there is a lot of discussion of sexual assault.