LARAMIE, Wyo. — Two books ago, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher passed through the southeast corner of Wyoming in his efforts to track down the owner of a pawned West Point ring. The book was “The Midnight Line,” and it was unusually transporting for a Reacher thriller. You could visualize the immense flat expanses of old railroad land stretching toward the foothills of the Rockies, the long miles of dirt road down which anyone could disappear under a vast open sky.
(Books of The Times): Debuts as sexy as Chris Pavone’s “The Expats” (2012) are rare. Pavone had previously worked in cookbook publishing. When that career became a fallen soufflé, he accompanied his wife and young sons to Luxembourg, which became the intriguingly offbeat setting for his first novel, an uncommonly devious espionage thriller.
The book’s title, “The Border,” refers to both physical and moral barriers. Winslow is well aware that both that and its cover image, which depicts a razor-wire-topped wall spreading across a desert landscape, are politically loaded.
