Chicky Diaz is the Bohemia Apartments’ most beloved doorman, the most prestigious building on the Upper West Side, the Manhattan neighborhood where New York City’s wealthiest families live. Among celebrities, financiers, billionaire widows, and art dealers—such as Emily Longworth, the protagonist of Chris Pavone’s book The Last Turn—and businessmen who have made fortunes (some dirty), like her husband, Whitaker (Wit) Hamilton Longworth, Chicky must ensure their safety.
The Plot
Emily wasn’t born into wealth; she lived in a dingy one-room flat in the Big Apple, but when she met her husband, her life changed dramatically. She married, had two children, and basically stopped working because it isn’t chic for a woman to earn money, so she continues to take on consulting gigs to stave off boredom and to escape a husband who proves to be a monster.
Although she should have everything she ever desired, Emily isn’t happy and she deeply hates the man by her side, whom she had silently detested even before the recent revelations about the source of his enormous fortune. It’s a pity that the prenuptial agreement is airtight and that she hasn’t yet found the strength to leave him.
Fortunately, at a glamorous event she attends without her husband, Emily meets Julian Sonnenberg, a successful art critic with whom she has a lot in common, a man who has spent fifty years living a full, cosmopolitan life and with whom she falls in love.
The Bohemia condominium comprises two separate wings, one for the rich and the other for the ultra-wealthy, where Sonnenberg and Longworth live, with top-tier security. Here there are only large apartments, such as 2A where Julian resides. There are those who own two units, like the Longworths, who live in the luxurious penthouse, the apartment 11C-D. Sonnenberg occupies one of the building’s cheaper units. The Longworth penthouse cost $32 million, plus another $7 million to renovate its 650-square-meter space. Other billionaires reside there, but Wit is the wealthiest.
Chicky has worked at Bohemia for 28 years; he is “the true definition of a doorman,” with his immaculate uniform and his bell-shaped cap. A 51-year-old former Marine, Puerto Rican by birth, he also plays a crucial role in the thriller’s plot.
Where the Mystery Unfolds
Almost the entire book is centered within the prestigious Bohemia condominium on the Upper West Side, a fictional name for one of the many luxury buildings that overlook Central Park on one side (Central Park West) and the Hudson River on the other—truly the most beautiful part of New York.
The Upper West Side corresponds exactly to the rectangle bounded by West 59th Street and West 110th Street and is regarded as the cultural and intellectual neighborhood. In this area you have Columbia University, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Institute of Technology, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—just to name a few of the most renowned addresses.
The image that Chris Pavone presents of Manhattan in The Last Turn is the collective imagination of neon lights, yellow taxis racing along the avenues, SUVs unloading residents from luxurious flats where the rich live, always loaded with shopping bags on Fifth Avenue, nannies with children and tiny dogs just out of the grooming parlor.
The Bohemia doesn’t exist in real life, but it could be any elegant building on the Upper West Side. Pavone may have drawn inspiration from the real-life events surrounding the famous The Dakota, the late-19th-century luxury condo on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at 72nd Street, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived when, in 1980, a man shot a member of the Beatles. And the Lennons weren’t the first or the last world-renowned figures to make The Dakota their home. For example, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, and Leonard Bernstein all lived there. These luminaries have since been eclipsed by billionaires for whom the building serves as a pied-à-terre, one of several residences.
The same Longworths divide their life between a Manhattan penthouse and a villa in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, near the southern coast of Cape Cod, a prestigious vacation spot along the U.S. coast where American presidents, celebrities, and affluent vacationers spend their holidays.
From Pavone’s description of the building, with its two tall towers, one might imagine something closer to another iconic Central Park residence that many have seen in films and TV: The San Remo.
Just a stone’s throw from the Dakota, The San Remo is a famous luxury building in New York from the early 20th century. It sits at 145-146 Central Park West, opposite Central Park. Designed by Emery Roth and completed in 1930, it was the city’s first twin-towered residential skyscraper. Over the years, the building has hosted many celebrities, including Steve Jobs, Bono of U2 (who bought the apartment from Jobs), Steven Spielberg, Demi Moore, Dustin Hoffman, and Dodi Al-Fayed.
The San Remo has a twin, the Eldorado, a historic Art Deco residential building on the Upper West Side of New York, facing the western edge of Central Park.
Beyond the gripping plot, this thriller truly makes you want to plan a trip to New York.
