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...

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 WifeOn 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...

From the award-winning author of Safe Houses —an electrifying new novel about a CIA agent and a young expat who find themselves caught up in a dangerous world, whose secrets, if revealed, could have disastrous repercussions for them both. When CIA agent Claire Saylor is told that she’ll be going undercover in Hamburg to pose as the wife of an academic who has published a controversial 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 Agency maverick, she realizes there may be more to this mission than meets the eye—and not just for professional reasons. Meanwhile, across town in Hamburg, Mahmoud, a recent Moroccan émigré, begins to fall under the sway of a group of radicals at his local mosque. The deeper he’s drawn into the group, the greater the danger he faces, and he is soon torn between his obligations to them and his feelings toward a beautiful westernized Muslim woman. As Claire learns the truth about her mission, and Mahmoud grows closer to the radicals, the danger between them builds and spells disaster far beyond the CIA.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Vlado Petric, a former homicide detective in Sarajevo, is now living in exile, and making a meagre living working at a Berlin construction site, when an American investigator for the International War Crimes Tribunal recruits him to return home on a mission. The assignment sounds simple enough. He is to help capture an aging Nazi collaborator who has become a war profiteer. But nothing is simple in the Balkans: Petric is also being used as bait to lure his quarry into the open, and when the operation goes sour he is drawn across Europe into a dangerous labyrinth of secret identities, stolen gold, and horrifying discoveries about his own family's past. Intelligent and suspenseful, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows brings together chilling crimes, the lies people live and the cold facts of international politics into a masterful, electrifying thriller.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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. From the Trade Paperback edition.From Publishers WeeklyWar correspondent Fesperman, the winner of the CWA's John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award, shines the light of his insider's knowledge into the dark corners of Jordan and Jerusalem in his gripping fifth thriller. After a career as an aid worker in some of the world's hot spots, 55-year-old Freeman Lockhart has retired with his 37-year-old Bosnian wife, Mila, to the Aegean island of Karos. The first night in their new home they wake to find three intruders, who spirit Freeman away to a nearby location where he's ordered to fly to Jordan to spy on a former friend and co-worker, Omar al-Baroody. When Freeman declines, his captors tell him that if he doesn't do what they ask, they'll tell the world his dark secret involving Mila from their days working in Africa. Freeman heads off to Amman to do their bidding. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a wealthy doctor, Abbas Rahim, plots an act of terrorism that will threaten the lives of the government's highest power brokers. Freeman may be an amateur spy, but Fesperman (The Prisoner of Guantánamo) proves once again that he's a consummate professional. Author tour.(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistBurned-out aid worker Freeman Lockhart wants nothing more than to retire to a Greek island with his beautiful young wife. He makes it to the island, but three men break into his house with a job offer: they want him to get back in the business, this time to spy on an old friend whose Jordanian charity may be financing terrorists. Fesperman is a former globe-trotting journalist whose nonfiction informs his novels. But after a terrific debut (Lie in the Dark, 1999), subsequent works have gradually grown more cerebral and less thrilling—and this latest effort is hamstrung by both a surplus of expository dialogue and by curiously old-fashioned prose (Lockhart, allegedly American, exclaims “Good Lord!” and calls other men “fellows” and “scoundrels”). Although politically savvy travelers will find much to interest them in the background, the action in the foreground is somewhat slack. We don’t doubt Fesperman’s reportorial skills, but given the contemporary nature of his knowledge, it would have been nice if this novel didn’t read like a work from the past. --Keir Graff

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 hinting that he should have dug deeper into Lemaster’s pronouncement. Spiked with cryptic references to some of Cage’s favorite spy novels, the note is the first of many literary bread crumbs that lead him back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, each instruction drawing him closer to the complex truth, each giving rise to more questions: Why is beautiful Litzi Strauss back in his life after thirty years? How much of his father’s job involved the CIA? As the events of Lemaster’s past eerily—and dangerously—begin intersecting with those of Cage’s own, a “long stalemate of secrecy” may finally be coming to an end. A story about spies and their secrets, fathers and sons, lovers and fate, duplicity and loyalty, The Double Game ingeniously taps the espionage classics of the Cold War to build a spellbinding maze of intrigue. It is Dan Fesperman’s most audacious, suspenseful, and satisfying novel yet.From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: The Double Game begins as a playful spy caper within a spy caper, in which clues to a mystery are found in the pages and plots of old spy novels. OK, clever enough. But the story quickly becomes more refreshingly and unexpectedly mysterious with each turn of the page, and I realized that Fesperman has achieved something remarkable here: He's turned the spy novel on its head while paying homage to the genre, at the same time giving us an unlikely protagonist who discovers that he's lived his entire life in a world “where fact and fiction were virtually indistinguishable.” --Neal ThompsonReview"'The Double Game is not just a spy novel - it's a love letter to the genre...cleverly woven into a thrilling story. Brilliantly executed and a joy from start to finish.' -Olen Steinhauer, author of An American Spy * 'A tantalizing, timely thriller' - Washington Post * 'A thought-provoking and exciting read' - Observer * 'One of the best writers of intelligent thrillers based on contemporary events working today...observant, thoughtful, witty' - Baltimore Sun * 'A new book by Dan Fesperman is becoming a major literary event... an utterly compelling thriller and quite simply the best I've read all year.' - Sunday Telegraph * 'Fesperman is the closest thing America has to John le Carre, a writer of great elegance and sophistication whose novels are as topical as they are compelling.' - Bookseller"

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 sightlines of the most ruthless and powerful man at the agency. Her attempts to expose the dark truths about...

A ruthless arms billionaire and a disgraced history professor share a terrible secret. 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 for them, Nat finds intriguing references both to Wolfe's curious 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, Nat uncovers a wartime story of love and betrayal which is reaching out from the past to destroy the present. Now Nat is in a desperate race to unlock the truth before others on the trail who would kill to stop the secret getting out.