Showing results by author "Dan Fesperman" in All Categories

From the author of The Double Game (one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012): a viscerally and psychologically gripping novel about drone warfare and about one pilot, attempting to stop its abuses and slamming up against the 21st century manifestation of the industrial military complex.

Corporate auditor Sam Keller, careful to a fault, has decided to live it up for a change. And what better spot for business-class hedonism than the boomtown of Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slopes of a shopping mall. But when a colleague is murdered during a night on the town, Sam soon finds himself waist-deep in a bewildering, lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, and crooked cops.

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 unfamiliar people 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.

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.

Who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side - "a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting" for his clients, and perhaps for himself: He hints at a much worldlier past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse.

A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster revealed to up-and-coming journalist Bill Cage that he’d once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, a Foreign Service brat who grew up in the very cities where Lemaster’s books were set, the news story created a brief but embarrassing sensation and heralded the beginning of the end of his career in journalism. More than two decades later, Cage, now a lonely, disillusioned PR man, receives an anonymous note....

When CIA agent Claire Saylor is told 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.

Nat Turnbull, a history professor who specializes in the German resistance, is only mildly surprised when his estranged mentor, Gordon Wolfe, is arrested for possession of stolen World War II archives. 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."

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.

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.

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when she overhears a meeting between two people speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorised encounter. 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.

Hal Knight, a comedian and movie star-turned politician, is no stranger to controversy. But after an embarrassing and humiliating encounter on set, Knight resigns from Congress, quits social media, and disappears to the tiny Caribbean island of Vieques to drink dirty martinis and nurse his wounds. Shortly after his arrival, he is approached by a trio of CIA operatives hoping to recruit him to infiltrate the power structure of Bolrovia—a hostile, Eastern European country whose despotic president, Nikolai Horvatz, happens to be a longtime fan of Knight’s adolescent male humor.

Vlado Petric, former detective in war-torn Sarajevo, has left his beloved homeland to join his wife and daughter in Germany, where he scratches a meagre living in the building sites of the new Berlin.When Petric returns to work one evening, he finds an enigmatic American investigator waiting for him in the small apartment he and his wife share. The investigator (Pine) works for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he tells Petric that they want him to return to Croatia

On a chilly early morning walk in 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, and 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.

Paris, October 1999. CIA agent Claire Saylor is looking after low-level surveillance ops. Her career has stalled after a misguided dalliance with her handler Paul Bridger - so when Bridger asks Claire to join a team, she prepares herself for a stint on tea duties. But in fact, he's finally put her back in the game. She'll be going undercover as the wife of Professor Winston Armitage - an expert in the Quran and its translations. He's presenting his controversial new theory on the fabled promise of 72 virgins for each martyr and needs protection.

9 février 1942. Dès son arrivée à New York, Woodrow Cain, un jeune flic du sud des États-Unis, est accueilli par les flammes qui s'échappent du paquebot Normandie, en train de sombrer dans l'Hudson. C'est au bord de ce même fleuve que va le mener sa première enquête, après la découverte d'un cadavre sur les docks, tenus par la mafia.

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. The note is the first of many literary bread crumbs that soon lead him back to Vienna, Prague and Budapest in search fo the truth, even as the events of Lemaster’s past eerily – and dangerously – begin intersecting with those of his own.

At 1 a.m. in a deserted Pennsylvania library, Nat Turnbull's cell phone rings. His former mentor, Professor Gordon Wolfe, has been arrested by the FBI for stealing top-secret archive documents dating back to the Second World War.

Coerced by the FBI into examining the archives, Nat finds intriguing references both to Wolfe's activities in an Allied intelligence office during the war and to a mysterious student resistance group in Berlin known as the White Rose.

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, 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.

Into a smoky chaos of sprawling humanity comes Skelly, a burned-out American war correspondent, now in harness again, thanks to a messy divorce and too many children. Post 9/11, he’s back in the game, in yet another new and extremely hazardous location, dropped from the skies after scarcely as much preparation as one might make for a weekend at the beach. Soon Skelly and his fixer, Najeeb, are driving dusty roads north, in the wake of Mahmood Abdul Khan – ex-Mujahadeen, ex-Taliban, currently good friend of the Allied forces.