Dan Fesperman

Decades after his favorite author confesses that he considered spying for the enemy during the Cold War, former journalist Bill Cage follows a trail of literary bread crumbs through Vienna, Prague, and Budapest to discover links between the author, a beautiful woman, and the CIA.

The Double Game

"In this gripping new work of suspense from the author of The Double Game, a young woman discovers a nefarious truth at the heart of the CIA's operations in postwar Berlin and goes on the run for her life; years later she's gruesomely murdered along with her husband, and her daughter begins to chase down these startling secrets from her past. 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"--

"A new novel from Dan Fesperman is always a twisty, well-plotted, intelligent delight. And Safe Houses is no exception. The germ of the story begins in West Berlin in 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. But during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two people speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities and then, before much longer, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her in the sightlines of the most ruthless and powerful man in the CIA. Her attempts to expose the crimes she has witnessed will bring about repercussions that reach across decades 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 . . . Those of us who are Fesperman fans know that his Cold War books are always tremendous fun, which resonate with the best of Le Carre and Tom Clancy. But with SAFE HOUSES he's also given us an intriguing murder mystery in a small town. And while Fesperman always gives us the most lifelike, layered, and thought-provoking characters, he's outdone himself with SAFE HOUSES two female leads, Helen Abell in 1979 Germany and Anna Shoat in present day Maryland. All of Dan Fesperman's prodigious talents are all on display with this wonderful new tale, from his gifts for historical recreation to technical know-how, to political intrigue. Crack the first few pages on this one and see if you don't agree"--

a novel

Safe houses

An exhilarating spy thriller inspired by a true story about the precious secrets up for grabs just after the fall of the Berlin Wall—from the acclaimed author of The Cover Wife On a chilly early morning walk on the wooded outskirts of Berlin, Emil Grimm finds the body of his neighbor, a fellow Stasi officer named Lothar, with a gunshot wound to the temple and a pistol in his right hand. Despite appearances, Emil suspects murder. A few months earlier he would have known just what to do, but now, as East Germany disintegrates, being a Stasi colonel is more of a liability than an asset. More troubling still is that Emil and Lothar were involved in a final clandestine mission, one that has clearly turned deadly. Now Emil must finish the job alone, on uncertain ground where old alliances seem to be shifting by the day. Meanwhile, CIA agent Claire Saylor, sent to Berlin to assist an Agency mop-up action against their collapsing East German adversaries, has just received an upgrade to her assignment. She'll be the designated contact for a high-ranking foreign intelligence officer of the Stasi, although details are suspiciously sketchy. When her first rendezvous goes dangerously awry, she realizes the mission is far more delicate than she was led to believe. With the rules of the game changing fast, and as their missions intersect, Emil and Claire find themselves on unlikely common ground, fighting for their lives against a powerful enemy hiding in the shadows.

A novel

Winter Work

"February 1942: Woodrow Cain arrives in New York City from a small North Carolina town having left behind a wife (who'd abandoned him), a daughter, and a career as a police officer marred by questions about his possible complicity in his partner's murder. A job in the NYPD gives him what he hopes will be a new beginning, and it's on the job that he meets a man called Danzinger. Dressed like a "strange old mystic," Danzinger nonetheless has the manners of a man of means and education and speaks five languages. And he can help Cain identify the body just found floating in the Hudson River. But who exactly is Danzinger?"--

The Letter Writer

Layover in Dubai

Cover Wife

Investigator Petric makes his living from the dead. Lately business has been slow, what with the siege around Sarajevo. Condoned killing has displaced the crime of passion; his services with the civil police as a homicide investigator have been less in demand. Unluckily one premeditated death does land on the detective's desk. It is no abused lover or a distant sniper's victim but a government official- the chief of the interior ministry's police- shot dead at close range.In a thriller that recalls the first excitement of Martin Cruz Smith's MOSCOW and the Vienna of 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 very lives- and he weaves through this torn cityscape one man's desperate, deadly pursuit of the wrong people in the worst places.

Lie in the Dark

A gripping new work of suspense about Cold War-era Berlin and a decades-long cover-up that has lethal consequences. West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amid the dangerous milieu of a city in the grip of the Cold Warl. Helen's world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two agents 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 firmly in the sights of one of the most ruthless and powerful men at the agency. With the help of two female colleagues, Helen goes on the run. Her attempts to expose the truth about what she has seen will create repurcussions that reach across decades and continents into the present day, when, in a farm town in Maryland, two people are gruesomely murdered. Now Helen's daughter, Anna, aided by a jaded Washington fixer, must chase down what is buried in her mother's past and face the chilling fact that old secrets never die.

Safe Houses

A SUNDAY TIMES CRIME CLUB STAR PICK. West Berlin, October 1979. Helen Abell is a young American, employed by the CIA to oversee a number of safe houses. She arrives in Berlin, expecting excitement and intrigue, and is disappointed to find the city a Cold War backwater. But one night, during a routine house inspection, she stumbles upon two dark but very different secrets. If made public, they could damage the careers of high-ranking people with powerful ambitions. But Helen decides that the price of silence might be costlier still, so she covertly works to reveal the truth even as she risks her career. Maryland, August 2014. In a small farming town, a young man called Willard Shoat gets up one night and shoots his parents while they are sleeping. His sister Anna hires a private investigator to help her understand her brother's motives. As they delve into the events leading up to her parents' deaths, Anna uncovers some startling secrets from her mother's past... 'An intelligent novel with psychology foregrounded... But can also raise readers' pulses' GUARDIAN.

A ruthless arms billionaire and a disgraced history professor share a terrible secret. 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.

The Arms Maker of Berlin

"A psychologically gripping descent into the eerie realm of drone warfare, led by one pilot's risky quest to expose its darkest secrets.  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, and haunted by what he saw on the display of the Predator drone he "piloted," especially by the memory of an Afghan child running for her life. He reluctantly teams up with three journalists seeking to discover the identity of the anonymous-and possibly rogue-intelligence operative who called the shots in Cole's ill-fated drone 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"--

Unmanned

An unflinching thriller from Dan Fesperman that takes us deep into the White Rose resistance movement during World War II. When Nat Turnbull’s mentor, Gordon Wolfe, is arrested for possession of a missing WWII secret service archive and then turns up dead in jail, Nat’s quiet academic life is suddenly thrown into tumult. The archive is a time bomb of sensitive material, but key documents are still missing, and the FBI dispatches Nat to track them down. Following a trail of cryptic clues, Nat's journeys to Germany, where he soon crosses paths with Berta, a gorgeous and mysterious student and Kurt Bauer, an arms billionaire with a dark past. As their tales intersect, long-buried exploits of deceit emerge, and each step becomes more dangerous than the last.

Skelly, a burned-out war correspondent, and his Pakistani translator, Najeeb, make a harrowing journey into war-torn Afghanistan, where they are plunged into a deadly web of intrigue, betrayal, violence, and religious extremism.

The Warlord's Son

Homicide detective Vlado Petric has escaped Sarajevo to join his wife and daughter in Berlin. When asked to return to Croatia to help the International War Crimes Tribunal bring the killers of Srebrenica to justice he accepts.

The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

Warlord's Son

"From the author of Safe Houses--An electrifying new novel about a CIA agent and a young Moroccan ex-pat who becomes ensnared in the world of radical Islam. When CIA agent Claire Saylor is told that she'll be going undercover to pose as the dowdy wife of a stuffy academic who has posited a controversial new interpretation of the Quran's promise to martyrs she assumes the job is a punishment for past unorthodox behavior. But when she discovers her team leader is Paul Bridger, another maverick within the agency, she realizes that the mission may be more interesting than meets the eye--and not just for professional reasons. At the same time, in Hamburg, Mahmoud, a recent Moroccan émigré, begins to fall under the sway of a group of radicals at his local Mosque. As his commitment to his new friends deepens, he finds himself torn between his obligations to them and the feelings he's developing towards a beautiful westernized Muslim woman. Their lives will intertwine, as Claire learns the truth about the mission in Hamburg, and Mahmoud's relationship with the radicals pulls him into dangerous waters. And they will both realize--but will it be too late?--that the consequences of their actions could well determine the very future of the United States"--

The Cover Wife

The Amateur Spy recasts the spy novel for the post-9/11 world—anyone might be watching, everyone is suspect. Freeman Lockhart, a humanitarian aid worker and his Bosnian wife have just retired to a charming house on a Greek island. On their first night, violent intruders blackmail Freeman into spying on an old Palestinian friend living in Jordan. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a Palestinian-American named Aliyah Rahim is worried about her husband, who blames their daughter's death on the U.S. anti-terror policies. Aliyah learns that he is plotting a cataclysmic act of revenge; in a desperate effort to stop him, she flies to Jordan to meet her husband's co-conspirators. There she encounters Freeman neck-deep in his own investigation. As their paths intertwine, the story rises to its fast-paced, explosive climax.

The Amateur Spy

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.

When the body of an American soldier is discovered in Cuban waters near the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo, Revere Falk, a former FBI agent, is reassigned from his job interrogating an accused al-Qaeda operative to investigate the soldier’s mysterious death. Falk soon finds himself in a deadly game of intrigue that stretches from the charged waters of Guantánamo Bay to the polished halls of Washington. Every move Falk makes could be costly, and to make matters worse, a dark figure from his past reappears, brandishing a secret he thought he had safely buried. The Prisoner of Guantánamo is a daring look at life behind the barbed wire of Gitmo and a riveting portrayal of what goes on in the most secret levels of our government.

Dan Fesperman

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