Jon Fasman

Nine hundred years after a twelfth-century Sicilian cat burglar steals artifacts that possess the secret to eternal life and scatters them throughout the world, a young Connecticut reporter finds evidence that someone is collecting the artifacts again, a story that is complicated by the murder investigation of a local professor. A first novel. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

The Geographer's Library

An investigation into the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how the police and justice system use surveillance technology, asking the question: what are citizens of a free country willing to tolerate in the name of public safety? The police now have unparalleled power at their fingertips: surveillance technology. Seamless, persistent, even permanent surveillance is available - sometimes already deployed, sometimes waiting for the right excuse. Automatic license-plate readers allow police to amass a granular record of where people go, when, and for how long. Drones give police eyes--and possibly weapons--in the skies. Facial recognition poses perhaps the most dire and lasting threat than any other technology. Algorithms purport to predict where and when crime will occur, and how big a risk a suspect has of re-offending. Tools can crack a device's encryption keys, rending all privacy protections useless. Embedding himself with both police and community activists in locales around the country - ranging from Newark, NJ and Baltimore, MD, to Los Angeles and Oakland, CA - Jon Fasman looks at how these technologies help police do their jobs, and what their use means for our privacy rights and civil liberties. We want safe streets and fewer criminals, but we also want to protect our privacy rights and civil liberties. Fasman provides a framing for thinking through through these issues, exploring questions like: should we expect to be tracked and filmed whenever we leave our homes? Should the state have access to all of the data we generate? Should private companies? What might happen if all of these technologies are combined and put in the hands of a government with scant regard for its citizens' civil liberties? Through on-the ground reporting and vivid story-telling, Fasman explores the moral, legal, and political questions these surveillance tools and techniques pose.

Liberty and Justice in an Age of Perpetual Surveillance

We See It All

A late-night call from a phone box in a quiet Connecticut town leads to the discovery of a dead Estonian history professor. Restless young reporter Paul Tomm is given the heads up - but he struggles to dig up any concrete facts for the man's obituary. And soon he suspects that Professor Jaan Puhapaev's death - and life - were far from usual. But he can't begin to imagine how right he is . . . As he discovers more about the increasingly mysterious professor's past, Paul is drawn deeper into a world of uncertainties. A library of rare alchemical works poses more questions than it answers. A low-life bar run by a sinister Albanian seems to be the front for far darker operations. Hannah - Jaan's alluring neighbour - is an enigmatic as she is seductive. Can fifteen arcane objects really be the key to the puzzle? And will they lead to the truth not only about a host of unexplained deaths, but also the secret of life itself? Somebody doesn't want Paul Tomm to find out . . .

"A brainy noir . . . [a] winningly cryptic tale . . . a cabinet of wonders written by a novelist whose surname and sensibility fit comfortably on the shelf between Umberto Eco and John Fowles." —Los Angeles Times "One of the year’s most literate and absorbing entertainments." —Kirkus Reviews Jon Fasman’s dizzyingly plotted intellectual thriller suggests a marriage between Dan Brown and Donna Tartt. When reporter Paul Tomm is assigned to investigate the mysterious death of a reclusive academic, he finds himself pursuing leads that date back to the twelfth century and the theft of alchemical instruments from the geographer of the Sicilian court. Now someone is trying to retrieve them. Interspersed with the present action are the stories of the men and women who came to possess those charmed—and sometimes cursed—artifacts, which have powers that go well beyond the transmutation of lead into gold. Deftly combining history, magic, suspense, and romance—and as handsomely illustrated as an ancient incunabulum—The Geographer’s Library is irresistible.

Fleeing America and his gambling debts, Jim Vilatzer uses the Russian language skills he learned from his émigré grandparents to land a job in Moscow interviewing Gulag survivors, work that brings him into the rich lives of his new neighbors and catches the suspicious attentions of Russia's Interior Ministry and the CIA. 40,000 first printing.

Jon Fasman

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