Showing results by author "Dan Fesperman" in All Categories

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. 

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.

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."

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...

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.

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.

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.

'The sun did not rise in Peshawar. It seeped - an egg-white smear that brightened the eastern horizon behind a veil of smoke, exhaust and dust. The smoke rose from burning wood, cow dung and old tires, meager flames of commerce for kebab shops and bakers, metal-smiths and brick kilns. The...

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.

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...

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...

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 “Fesperman accurately depicts the corrosive effect of life under a surveillance society, debasing both the watchers...

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 An adrenaline-fueled thriller about a disgraced comedian-turned-politician who takes on the role of a lifetime: infiltrating a corrupt Eastern European country to spy on their brutal dictator Hal Knight, a comedian and movie star-turned politician, is no...

1979. Berlin-Ouest. Helen Abell Shoat est engagée par la CIA pour s'occuper des résidences sécurisées destinées aux agents en mission. Une nuit, alors qu'elle se trouve dans l'une de ces " planques ", elle est témoin d'une scène troublante, impliquant un agent de haut rang.

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.

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.

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.