Screenwriter Hired for Film Adaptation of The Expats by Chris Pavone

CBS Films is quickly moving forward with its film adaptation of The Expats by Chris Pavone, hiring Alex Holmes (House of Saddam) to write the screenplay. The studio optioned the book, which is published tomorrow, last month.

The book's storyline follows Kate Moore, a working mother struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to keep a spark in her marriage … and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret. So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance to leave behind her double-life, to start anew.

She begins to reinvent herself as an expat, finding her way in a language she doesn't speak, doing the housewifely things she's never before done — play dates and coffee mornings, daily cooking and never-ending laundry. Meanwhile, her husband works incessantly, at a job Kate has never understood, for a banking client she's not allowed to know. He's becoming distant and evasive; she's getting lonely and bored.

Then another American couple arrives. Kate soon becomes suspicious that these people are not who they say they are, and she's terrified that her own past is catching up to her. So Kate begins to dig, to peel back the layers of deception that surround her. She discovers fake offices and shell corporations and a hidden gun, a mysterious farmhouse and numbered accounts with bewildering sums of money, and finally unravels the mind-boggling long-play con that threatens her family, her marriage, and her life.

(Related article: The Hollywood Reporter.)