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This page lists novels by Dan Fesperman.

The cover images are for the first edition and for a recent paperback or digital edition.

Lie in the Dark

Dan Fesperman

1999

A Vlado Petric novel.

"Vlado Petric is a homicide investigator in war-torn Sarajevo. When he encounters an unidentified body near “sniper alley,” he realizes that it is the body of Esmir Vitas, chief of the Interior Ministry’s special police, and that Vitas has been killed not by any sniper’s aim but by a bullet fired at almost point blank range. Searching for the killer in this “city of murderers,” Petric finds himself drawn into a conspiracy, the scope of which goes beyond anything he could possibly have imagined. Lie in the Dark brilliantly renders the fragmented society and underworld of Sarajevo at war—the freelancing gangsters, guilty bystanders, the drop-in foreign correspondents, and the bureaucrats frightened for their jobs and very lives. It weaves through this torn cityscape the alienation and terror of one man’s desperate and deadly pursuit of bad people in an even worse place."

The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

Dan Fesperman

2003

A Vlado Petric novel.

"Vlado Petric, former detective in war-torn Sarajevo, has left his beloved homeland to join his wife and daughter in Germany. Returning home one evening, he finds an enigmatic American investigator waiting for him in the small apartment. The investigator, Calvin Pine, works for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he tells Petric that they want him to go to The Hague. It doesn't take Petric long to accept, especially when Pine tells him they are after a big fish: one of the men who they think is responsible for the terrible massacre of Srebrenica. What Petric doesn't know is that he is also being used as bait to lure into the open a murderer from the previous generation; a man whose activities in the Second World War makes the current generation of killers look like amateurs. As Petric travels from modern-day Germany, through the ruins of Bosnia, to the peaceful hills of southern Italy where bitter, unresolved tensions still crackle beneath the surface, the stakes become all too personal. And he soon finds that investigating the mysteries of the past can be every bit as dangerous as finding his way through the war zones of the present."

The Warlord's Son

Dan Fesperman

2004

"Dropping into the smoky chaos of Peshawar after 9/11, Skelly, a burned-out American foreign correspondent, discovers that to survive in Peshawar's swirling humanity he will need a 'fixer': a local man who speaks English, knows the area, and is a jack-of-all-trades who can both save his skin and take him to the action. And for journalists in Peshawar, the real action is in Afghanistan. Skelly chooses Najeeb, the banished son of a tribal warlord. Soon they are driving dusty roads westward in the shadowy wake of ex-Mujahadeen Mahmood Razaq, tipped to claim leadership of the next regime. Skelly's quest for the scoop of a lifetime means tracking down the one man the whole world is seeking. And Najeeb, torn by divided loyalties, must find the way for both of them, in a land where a single misstep - or lapse of trust - can prove fatal."

The Prisoner of Guantanamo

Dan Fesperman

2006

"Revere Falk is an FBI interrogator who believes it is possible to get more from a terrorist suspect by treating him decently than by using more 'robust' methods. He lives his life by a certain code of honour. This puts him in a minority at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. So when the body of a US soldier is found under mysterious circumstances on the beach, and a high-ranking investigative team is flown in, Falk should be above suspicion. But Falk has a secret, a secret he had hoped was dead and buried. Now, it is reaching out from his past, to the sodium-lit cell blocks and stifling humidity of this claustrophobic rumour-mill of a community, and its implications are greater than he could ever have imagined."

The Amateur Spy

Dan Fesperman

2007

"Freeman Lockhart is working for his old friend Omar in Amman, Jordan. And spying on him too. Hoping to prevent his own secrets from ever coming to light, Freeman has agreed to report back on his friend to a clandestine agency interested in Omar's finances. In Washington DC, meanwhile, Aliyah Rahim is spying on her husband Abbas. A brilliant doctor, Abbas is crushed by the death of their daughter, which he blames on the post-9/11 mood of hostility towards Arab-Americans, and Aliyah fears he may be planning a terrifying act of revenge. Freeman and Aliyah are pitched into the same deadly game, in which the only rules are violence and deceit."

The Arms Maker of Berlin

Dan Fesperman

2009

"Nat Turnbull is dragged abruptly from his quiet academic life when his former mentor Professor Gordon Wolfe is arrested for stealing top secret archive documents dating back to the Second World War. Coerced into examining the archives for the FBI, Nat finds intriguing references both to Wolfe's activities in an Allied intelligence office in Switzerland during the war, and to a mysterious student resistance group in Berlin known as the White Rose. Following Wolfe's cryptic clues to Europe, soon Nat is in a desperate race to unlock the truth, before it gets him killed."

Layover in Dubai

Dan Fesperman

2010

"Sam Keller, an auditor at a giant pharmaceutical firm, expected a six-hour layover in Dubai. Then his company's corporate security officer asked him to extend his stay two days to keep an eye on a hard-partying colleague. Sam agrees, but against his better judgment, he decides to live it up a little, which has disastrous results. First Hatcher is murdered. Then Sam is arrested. Was he set up? Unsure whether he can trust his employer, Sam forms an unlikely alliance with Anwar Sharaf, a former pearl diver and gold smuggler. As the duo works its way toward the heart of the case, plunging waist-deep into a lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, crooked cops, consuls, and corporate players, each must confront the darkest forces threatening Dubai from within."

The Double Game

Dan Fesperman

2012

"A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster reveals to young journalist Bill Cage that he'd once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, a fan who grew up as a Foreign Service brat in the very cities where Lemaster set his plots, the story creates a brief but embarrassing sensation. More than two decades later, Cage, by then a lonely, disillusioned PR man, receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper. Spiked with cryptic references to some of his and his father's favorite old spy novels, the note is the first of many literary bread crumbs that soon lead him back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in search of the truth, even as the events of Lemaster's past eerily - and dangerously - begin intersecting with those of his own. Why is beautiful Litzi Strauss back in his life after 30 years? How much of his father's job involved the CIA? Did Bill, as a child, become a pawn? As the suspense steadily increases, a long stalemate of secrecy may finally be broken."

Unmanned

Dan Fesperman

2014

"As an F-16 fighter pilot, Darwin Cole was a family man on top of his world. Now he's a washout - drunk and alone in a trailer in the Nevada desert, haunted by the memory of an Afghan child running for her life from the Predator drone he 'piloted'. Reluctantly, Cole teams up with three journalists seeking to discover the identity of the anonymous intelligence operative who called the shots in that ill-fated mission. But in a surveillance culture, even the well-intentioned must sometimes run for their lives. Especially when they're tracking leads to the very heart of that culture - in intelligence, in the military, and among the unchecked private contractors who stand to profit richly from the advancing technology... Technology not just for use 'over there', but for right here, right now."

The Letter Writer

Dan Fesperman

2016

"February 9, 1942. Disgraced Southern cop Woodrow Cain arrives in New York City for a new position with the NYPD and is greeted with smoke billowing out from the SS Normandie, engulfed in flames on the Hudson. On Cain's first day on the job, a body turns up in the same river. Unfamiliar with the milieu of mob bosses and crooked officials in the big city, Cain's investigation stalls, until a strange man who calls himself Danziger enters his life. Danziger looks like a miscreant, but speaks five languages, has the manners of a gentleman, and is the one person who can help Cain identify the body. A letter writer for illiterate European immigrants, Danzinger has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city's denizens and networks--and possesses information that extends beyond the reach of his clients, hinting at an unfathomable past. As the body count grows, Cain and Danziger inch closer toward an underground web of possibly traitorous corruption . . . but in these murky depths, not even Danzinger can know what kind of danger will await them."

Safe Houses

Dan Fesperman

2018

"West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two people unfamiliar to her speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her in the sight lines of the most ruthless and powerful man at the agency. Her attempts to expose the dark truths about what she has witnessed will bring about repercussions that reach across decades and continents into the present day, when, in a farm town in Maryland, a young man is arrested for the double murder of his parents, and his sister takes it upon herself to find out why he did it."