Dan Fesperman Books In Order

Lie in the Dark

Intrigue reminiscent of The Third Man set in Sarajevo.

Investigator Petric makes his living from the dead, what with the siege around Sarajevo. Lately business has been slow. Condoned killing has displaced the crime of passion. His services with the civil police as a homicide investigator have been less in demand. One premeditated death does call for inquiry. It is no abused lover or distant sniper’s victim but a government official shot dead at close range the chief of the Interior Ministry’s special police.

In a thriller that recalls the dark excitement of Vienna in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, author Dan Fesperman brilliantly renders the fragmented society and underworld of Sarajevo at war the freelancing gangsters, guilty bystanders, drop in correspondents, the bureaucrats frightened for their jobs and for their very lives and weaves through this torn cityscape one man’s desperate, deadly pursuit of the wrong people in the wrongest place.

The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

In Dan Fesperman’s highly praised Lie in the Dark A quite astonishing first novel Ian Rankin, we met Vlado Petric, a homicide detective in Sarajevo, a war torn place where life itself had little worth. Now, five years later, Petric has escaped to join his wife and daughter in Berlin, and is scratching out a meager but stable existence at a construction site. So when he s recruited by Calvin Pine an enigmatic American investigator for the war crimes tribunal at The Hague to join a search mission back in the ruins of his homeland, he finds it hard to resist. They re seeking a general responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica, but Petric is also being offered as bait to lure another suspect whose activities in World War II make the current generation of killers look like amateurs. Getting hotter on a trail that eventually leads across Europe, Petric soon finds that great political powers make unsavory alliances, and that investigating the mysteries of the past can be as dangerous as navigating the war zones of the present.A gripping novel about legends and lies, about great deceptions and personal truths, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows is a galvanizing detective novel in a vein that brilliantly transcends the genre.

The Warlord’s Son

In a riveting tale of intrigue and betrayal, a journalist and his aide infiltrate Afghanistan on the eve of the American invasion. Skelly, a jaded war correspondent, is looking for one last scoop. Najeeb, his translator and guide, is an educated young man from the Pakistani Afghani border with a secret past, a history with the Pakistani secret police, and his own motives for this risky adventure. Together they join a Warlord’s caravan as he seeks to start an uprising that will liberate the country from the Taliban. Along the way, they stumble onto what they think might just be the story of a lifetime. What they find is a shady world of hidden agendas, shifting allegiances, and sudden betrayals a world where one wrong move would get them both killed and the only hope for survival lies in their loyalty to each other.

The Prisoner of Guantanamo

Dan Fesperman’s award winning novels have transported readers to the heart of some of the world s most volatile places: Yugoslavia during the Balkan Wars in Lie in the Dark and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows A new standard for war based thrillers Los Angeles Times, and Afghanistan during the last days of the Taliban in The Warlord s Son A first rate geopolitical yarn Entertainment Weekly. Now he turns his sights closer to home to the secretive, overheated world of Guant namo to give us a galvanizing new thriller. Revere Falk FBI veteran, Arabic speaker is an interrogator at Gitmo, assigned to a hold out, a Yemeni prisoner who may have valuable information about al Qaeda. But these duties are temporarily suspended when the body of an American soldier is found washed ashore in Cuban territory. No American has ever turned up dead on the wrong side of the fence before. Suddenly, Cold War tension is back, and Falk finds himself at the heart of it when he s put in charge of the investigation into the death. Almost immediately he senses an unusual level of interest in the proceedings: from his commander, from the Cubans, and from the various factions of the military. And when the Defense Intelligence Agency unexpectedly sends its own team to reinforce the investigation, Falk understands that there is much more at play than anybody is willing to admit. He is drawn into a game of evasion and pursuit, a game whose stakes spike dangerously when a figure from his past reappears someone who knows secrets about him that he had hoped were buried forever. An intricately layered, blistering tale of subterfuge and deception at the highest, most hidden levels of the government, and in the most intimate, and vulnerable, moments of individual lives, The Prisoner of Guant namo is as timely and razor sharp in its depiction of life and death at Gitmo as it is unstoppably suspenseful.

The Amateur Spy

The Amateur Spy Dan Fesperman’s most galvanizing thriller yet takes us to a flashpoint of global intrigue, recasting the spy novel for the post 9/11 world: Anyone might be watching; everyone is suspect. Burned out by years of humanitarian aid work, Freeman and Mila Lockhart have retreated to an idyllic Greek island. But on the first night of their new life they are surprised by three intruders who seem to know everything about Freeman including a haunting secret he has long kept from Mila. They use it to blackmail him into spying on an old Palestinian friend in Jordan. Overnight, Freeman is plunged into the maelstrom of the Middle East and is quickly in over his head. In suburban Washington, D.C., meanwhile, a prosperous Palestinian American couple, Abbas and Aliyah Rahim, are still grieving for their daughter, accidentally killed while vacationing abroad. Abbas, a surgeon whose patients number among the nation s elite, blames her death on the bureaucratic machinations of overly suspicious officials. Aliyah fears he may be reeling toward fanaticism, and her efforts to avert this take her to Jordan. Like Freeman, she is soon overwhelmed by the region s dangerous passions and complexities. As their paths converge, Freeman and Aliyah both desperately worried about the loved ones they left behind must swiftly separate fact from illusion, enemy from friend. The consequences of failure could be catastrophic…
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The Arms Maker Of Berlin

This powerfully suspenseful new novel from Dan Fesperman takes us deep into the early 1940s in Switzerland and Germany as it traces the long reach of the wartime intrigues of the White Rose student movement, which dared to speak out against Hitler.

When Nat Turnbull, a history professor who specializes in the German resistance, gets the news that his estranged mentor, Gordon Wolfe, has been arrested for possession of stolen World War II archives, he’s hardly surprised that, even at the age of eighty four, Gordon has gotten himself in trouble. But what s in the archives is staggering: a spymaster s trove missing since the end of the war, one that Gordon has always claimed is full of secrets you can t find anywhere else…
live ammunition.

Yet key documents are still missing, and Nat believes Gordon has hidden them. The FBI agrees, and when Gordon is found dead in jail, the Bureau dispatches Nat to track down the material, which has also piqued the interest of several dangerous competitors. As he follows a trail of cryptic clues left behind by Gordon, assisted by an attractive academic with questionable motives, Nat s quest takes him to Bern and Berlin, where his path soon crosses that of Kurt Bauer, an aging German arms merchant still ho*arding his own wartime secrets. As their stories and Gordon s intersect across half a century, long buried exploits of deceit, devotion, and doomed resistance begin working their way to the surface. And as the stakes rise, so do the risks…

Layover in Dubai

The newest thriller from the author of The Amateur Spy and The Prisoner of Guant namo Worthy of sharing shelf space with the novels of John le Carr and Ken Follett USA Today is as dazzling as its setting. Sam Keller has been enlisted by his V.P. for Corporate Security and Investigation to spy on another employee while they re traveling for the company. Ordinarily careful to a fault, Sam decides to live it up. What better spot for business class hedonism than boomtown Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slope of a shopping mall. But when Sam’s charge is murdered during a night on the town, it is only the first in a series of bewildering events that plunge him waist deep into a lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, crooked cops, consuls, and corporate players. Offering a chancy way out is Anwar Sharaf, the unlikeliest of detectives. A former pearl diver and gold smuggler with an undignified demeanor, Sharaf is sometimes as baffled as Sam by the changes to his homeland, especially as they are embodied in the behavior of his rebelliously independent and hauntingly beautiful daughter. But he knows where the levers of power reside. As the unlikely duo work their way toward the heart of the case, each man must confront the darkest forces threatening Dubai from within. Here is Dan Fesperman s most suspenseful novel yet: a stunning portrait of a city whose mysterious rhythm like the precision throb of an artificial heart, clicking and insistent, yet cool to the touch is underscored by the insistent clashing of old and new. From the Hardcover edition.