The Travelers by Chris Pavone


Pack your bags and get as far away as you can from The Travelers, a suspense novel by Chris Pavone where Will Rhodes is made a spy overnight.  

Will Rhodes is constantly questioning himself if he's made the right decisions in life, whether it be about his job, which is writing for the magazine, The Travelers, or his marriage, wondering if he married the right woman or if she even loves him.  One night, he is in France working when he is approached by Elle, who isn't at all what she seems.  Before he knows it, he is asked to be a spy by Elle.  Though Will goes back and forth if he should take on this job, he agrees and becomes a spy.  One by one every choice Will makes is worse than the one before and he is sent all over the world by this new spy ring he is apart of.  Will soon find out that everything in his life wasn't what he always thought it was.

Looking at the cover, you can sense the suspense that the two main characters are spies, or at least they are too that are doing secret acts.  Neither face is shown completely, adding to who are these people and will we get to know them?  Unfortunately, what I thought when looking at the cover, it wasn't at all what it seemed while reading the book.

Pavone made this a difficult book to get through as I was hoping to like it.  The summary caught my attention and I was hoping as I read the book would keep getting better, but it didn't.  In fact, I still have no idea what it is I read, but it didn't seem to fit the summary at all.  Pavone wrote the chapters with too much going on.  There were more than one story in each chapter, adding way too many characters to keep track.  And if a chapter concentrated on specific chapters, sudden changes in time without indication made me lose interest quite quickly.  I love fast paced books, but when it flows smoothly.  This did not.  One thing I couldn't stand that Pavone did was leave scenes up and open and never go back to finish what we just saw.  I found myself looking forward to seeing how a certain scene finished and then it would just stop at a dead end.  As for the main characters of Will and Chloe, they were not likable at all.  Neither seemed to take their marriage seriously.  And Chloe, she was way too cold.  I couldn't find anything good or redeeming in her.  

Pavone knew what he was doing to grab the reader's attention when he wrote the prologue.  That was the only time I found suspense in the novel.  After that, not so much.  The real action happened in the first part of the novel which I was happy to see.  But Pavone should've kept up with that story and that pace.  

I rated this book 2 out of 5 stars.  If Pavone stuck to just one story and kept that as the main theme of the novel, it would've made more sense and an easier read. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone because it was really hard to get through and at times gave me a headache of everything going on.

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.



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