Dan FespermanRezensionen

This turned out to be one of the best Spy novels I have read. It was totally engrossing . Both 1979 part of the story and the 2014 part were equally exciting and I found the book extremely difficult to put down.

What an interesting read - dual narratives, moving back and forth between 1979 -Germany CIA /Langley, VA CIA hdqtrs and then 2014, the daughter of the protagonist, and an investigator - trying to get the bottom of her mental disabled brother's complete breakdown: he shoots both his parents, and then calmly sits on front porch when authorities discover the grisly double murder. Part CIA-Cold War drama, part murder mystery investigation - compelling characters and a real twist in the last chapter... why isn't this a limited film series or a movie? Holy cow -it'd be sooo suspenseful. Have to pay attention - the narratives shift back & forth and it's a bit drawn out in the 2014 part, but still worth the read!½

Digital audiobook performed by David Bendena

After his wife left him and his partner was killed, detective sergeant Woodrow Cain left North Carolina to start over in New York City. But it’s 1942 and the USA has entered the war against Germany and Japan. When a body is found floating in the Hudson River. Cain meets a man named Danzinger. He looks like a “crackpot,” but he speaks five languages fluently and has the manners of a man of means and education. But who is he really? And is Danzinger really helping Cain solve the murder, or ensnaring him in a larger espionage plot?

This was really a great read. Many of the hallmarks of literary fiction, as well as the pace of an espionage thriller. The characters are fully realized, and I liked the way Fesperman wove their relationships together. The writing is atmospheric, and the setting is vividly portrayed. There are enough plot twists to keep the most ardent mystery fan guessing. I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to reading more works by Fesperman.

David Bendena does a marvelous job of performing the audiobook. He’s a talented voice artist and is able to use a variety of accents as required by the eclectic mix of characters.

Vlado Petric, un ex policía en el Sarajevo desgarrado por la guerra, tiene que dejar su tierra para reunirse con su esposa y su hija en Alemania, donde se gana modestamente el sustento como trabajador de la construcción en las obras del nuevo Berlín. Una tarde, al volver a casa después de la jornada laboral, un enigmático investigador estadounidense le está esperando en el pequeño apartamento familiar. El investigador, Calvin Pine, enviado por el Tribunal Internacional para Crímenes de Guerra en la ex Yugoslavia, solicita a Petric que viaje a La Haya. Petric acepta sin titubeos cuando Pine le dice que están siguiendo a un pez gordo: uno de los hombres a los que consideran responsables de la terrible matanza de Srebrenica.
Lo que Petric no sabe es que lo están utilizando como cebo para descubrir a un asesino de la generación anterior, un hombre cuyas actividades en la Segunda Guerra Mundial hacen que los asesinos de ésta parezcan aficionados.

Vivo o muerto, el enemigo había llegado a la costa de Guantánamo y eso era motivo de alarma en La Habana. El cadáver de un soldado norteamericano alcanza la orilla al otro lado de la Base Naval entre las iguanas y los guardias fronterizos cubanos. ¿Qué está sucediendo en el Gitmo, el nombre preferido del Pentágono para denominar a la reconvertida cárcel de alta seguridad para los detenidos en la guerra mundial contra el terrorismo? ¿Quién está matando a soldados norteamericanos? Revere Falk, un arabista y agente del FBI destinado en Guantánamo para interrogar a los detenidos, se tendrá que hacer cargo de la investigación. Nada será igual desde aquel día, el mismo en el que ha logrado que su nuevo detenido, un yihadista yemení de 19 años, Adnan Al-Hamdi, confiese por fin el nombre de su protegido: Hussey. Pero Falk intuye que debe callarse. En los 116 kilómetros cuadrados de la base de Guantánamo no hay secretos. Y Falk podrá comprobar que el espionaje no sólo es cubano, sino que CIA, FBI y el propio Ejército norteamericano compiten por el control de la información. Y él deberá tener especial cuidado: tiene un vínculo común con el lugar, un vínculo con una historia extraña e inquietante que creía completamente olvidado. ¿Pero lo conoce alguien más?

Un très subtil roman policier new yorkais, conspirationniste à souhait… et pour une fois c'est une qualité!

This book vividly captures those chaotic first months after the Berlin Wall came down, with East Germany in free fall and once-feared Stasi officers were running for cover.

A real page turner for me. Recommend it to those who like WWII and Cold War era spy novels. This one bounces back-and-forth between the 1940s and "today" in Bern, Berlin, and the U.S. Our hero is Nat Turnbull, a History professor who gets mixed up in a high-stakes mystery that just exploded around his mentor. FBI agents, a beautiful history professor who grew up in Communist East Germany, Iranians, resistance fighters and old Nazis round out the cast. Fesperman brings to life the horrors of living in a society where you can trust no one, not even those you love. He doesn't seem to have an axe to grind and doesn't 'moralize.' The result is a book that has left me with a lot to think about it...it is a story that will stay on my mind long after I've read the last page.

espionage, cold-war-era, spies, Germany, relationships, law-enforcement, thriller, suspense****

Set in the espionage chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is a very interesting look into reality based fiction from the points of view of two different agencies/agents. This conflict id further complicated by the medical status of one wife. Suspense, plot twists, and more as is to be expected from this celebrated author.
I requested and received a free e-book copy from Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Knopf via NetGalley. Thank you

Here's the thing- I love spy stories and mysteries. I've read a lot of them and I sort of like Fesperman, but to my mind they all have the same flaw- too many characters of whom we know little and too many red herrings. Sometimes I think he wants you to be as confused as the protagonist, but that can get annoying. So, for a while I was annoyed. I stuck with it, however, and wasn't sorry I read it, but be warned of the style.

Not bad. Got better as it went along and you could get all the characters sorted.

Ontspannend en net spannend genoeg. Goede research betreffende de Balkanoorlog neem ik aan...Aangenaam tussendoortje.
Enkele hoofdrolspelers worden af en rood tot achter hun oren, wat ik nogal vreemd vond voor doorwinterde spionnen, maar dat is slechts een aardigheidje :)

A book with great depth and history along with great sorrows. One of my favorite authors.

Fesperman can always be counted on for a solid, fast-moving, well-developed story. In this case, a seasoned if somewhat independent-minded spy is assigned to play the role of the wife of an academic who has written a scholarly book that has scandalized fundamentalist Muslims and delighted people who don't like Muslims. She is meant to provide protection as he speaks at a conference of Near Eastern scholars and to the press in Germany. Things, of course, go wrong and characters turn out to be not quite who they seem. The time frame for the story is the late 1990s, just as Al Qaeda is preparing a world-shaking attack on the Western world.

In addition to being a good yarn, full of switchbacks and surprises, it's a nicely-drawn portrait of an intelligence community that has all the resources it needs but is too busy with infighting and lack of cultural competence to carry out their work successfully. There's also a cameo appearance of a character from Safe Houses.

I think The Prison of Guantanamo was the first time I discovered Fesperman. He continues to write smart and fast-moving books that avoid glamorizing espionage while thrusting readers into the midst of a well-resourced but flawed world of competing intelligence operations.

Good Read and I think fairly accurate of a lot of WW2

The Double Game by Dan Fesperman rates 4.5 stars. It's a cleverly written homage to all espionage novels. Our hero, Bill Cage, grew up with a father who not only worked in the secret service but was a collector of spy novels. After interviewing a retired spy, Bill is lead on a chase throughout Europe with clues from spy novels that now fit real life. Not only is the premise and its execution good, but there is an appendix in the back that is the most complete I have seen of spy novels. Worth having on your bookshelf for that alone.½

Better than most detective novels, well written, the Sarajevo backdrop grittily described and well used, characterization a bit thin but plot adequate.

Dan Fesperman is not a new-to-me author. I have read three of his previous novels (Lie in the Dark, The Prisoner of Guantanamo, and The Amateur Spy), each of which I enjoyed because of their complicated plots and Fesperman’s writing style. But because I decided to go with the audiobook version of Safe Houses this time around, I learned something about Fesperman I probably would never have otherwise picked up on: if this man couldn’t write a lick, he could make one heck of a living narrating the audiobooks of other writers. He is so good a narrator that I had to double-check to make sure that it was really him doing the reading. The way that Fesperman changes voices, accents, gender-inflections, and the like, makes Safe Houses one of my all-time favorite audiobooks. Fesperman proves here that not only can he write a good story, he can tell a good story.

It all starts in 1979 West Berlin when Helen Abell, a 22-year-old CIA secretary/clerk who has been assigned the task of overseeing the Agency’s Berlin safe house network, in a single day overhears two conversations that greatly trouble her. Helen is only in the safehouse to make sure that things are still in order since her last visit. While upstairs checking the integrity of the recording equipment in the house, she hears two unidentifiable agents enter downstairs for a meeting that is not on the schedule she maintains for the Agency. She is mystified by what she hears – and inadvertently records – but she senses that something is very, very wrong about their conversation. A few hours later, when she returns to the safe house to erase the damning tape, Helen overhears – and witnesses – something even more personally disturbing.

Now, Helen is on the radar of a rogue CIA agent who will do anything to protect his reputation and status inside the Agency. This is a man who has a long memory, friends within the Agency who are just as ruthless as him, and all the tools he needs to eliminate anyone who threatens him. He has just about everything but a conscious. His memory is, in fact, so long that Helen will never feel safe for the rest of her life.

Flash forward to a chicken farm in present day Maryland where a young man has just been arrested for the brutal double-murder of his parents. The young man in question has been under psychiatric care most of his life, but he has never indicated a capacity for violent behavior. His sister knows that something has gone terribly, unexpectedly, wrong in her family home, and she wants to know why it happened. But when she and the investigator she hires suddenly find themselves running for their own lives, it begins to look as if she won’t live long enough to get any answers.

Bottom Line: Considering everything we’ve learned recently about the CIA and the FBI, Safe Houses is a thriller that would have seemed more farfetched in 2018 when it was published than it does today. That said, this is a solid thriller centered around three young women who decide they can no longer ignore the sordid behavior of a handful of their male colleagues. The women are willing to risk their careers and their lives to set things right – and some of them will indeed lose both.

This is a combination spy thriller and mystery story that alternates between two different "time zones" - Berlin in the the late 1970's, and rural Maryland in 2014. In the Berlin part of the story a young female CIA operative learns of a couple of things she shouldn't know -- a mysterious entity called "the Pond", and a senior CIA person who is very bad indeed. What happens next, and how our heroine gets into a whole lot of trouble, comprises the spy section. In the Maryland part, many years later, the CIA operative's daughter is trying to find out what happened to her mother, and why. The novel alternates between one time zone and the other, which gives it a lot of momentum and a lot of interest. The central characters are well drawn, the sense of place is evocative, and probability is not strained too dreadfully far. A good read.½

Danger, intrigue and spies lurking around every corner. A good read with a nice appendix list of many other espionage novels/authors.

Fun to read, complex. Too much "Hollywood" to merit more than 3 stars.

Befuddling in its complexity but superb if only for its bibliography. 200 espionage titles there for the finding. (The list is organized chronologically and by author. The former is excellent if you seek Cold War espionage without 21st century Islamophobism.)

I read a lot of crime and spy fiction, usually series. I read Dan Fesperman’s stand-alone novel, “Layover in Dubai”, (LD) for three reasons – I had just read some very favorable comments about Dan while scanning a review of another author’s work, the Amazon readers’ reviews were well over a 4.0, and I wanted to learn more about Dubai. In my occasional flights to and fro India, I often have a brief layover in Dubai, Doha and other exotic places, but have never ventured beyond the airports. After reading this book I’m thinking “good decision”.

There is plenty of local flavor in LD; it’s clear the author speaks from personal experiences and observations. There is a lot about the incredible wealth, the towering office buildings, the extravagant malls. But there is also a good deal about local customs, and not only women’s rights in public, but at home as well. Dan also touches on the very stunning demographics of the Dubai residents, including the native birth of clusters of its police force. And the incredible wealth, and the incredible cars, speeds, crashes, jams. And then there’s the seamier side as well, human trafficking for example., a key plot point of LD.

Our hero, Sam Keller, is a bit of a rising star at his NYC-based pharmaceutical corporation. He is tasked with accompanying one of the company’s more senior reps on a trip to the Middle East, in large part to keep the gentleman from misbehaving; it is to be a quick trip, a layover of sorts. But Sam is in Dubai for only hours before being pursued by police Lt. Assad for the murder of his companion. Sam is rescued, temporarily by Sharaf, another police officer and opponent of Assad. Sharaf puts Sam up at his home for one night where Sam gets a taste of Dubai home life, but not of Sharaf’s stunningly attractive and capable 25 year old daughter. And he crosses paths with Mama, Amina.

The story is well written, fast-paced, well plotted, and has interesting characters; it gave me everything in the way of local color that I was hoping for. It includes a fight to the death atop a tower under construction on the edge of an elevator shaft. And a very good climax and good ending. I will read more of Dan’s works, and will get “The Letter Writer” in the near future, and likely “Safe Houses” and “The Arms Maker of Berlin” afterwords.

Dan Fesperman's police procedural, LIE IN THE DARK, was first published in 1999. It is a powerful story about a Bosnian homicide detective, Investigator Petric, who tries to solve crimes while staying honest among corrupt colleagues, gangsters and drop-in newspaper correspondents in wartime Sarajevo.

The copy of the book I read says that Fesperman is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He has a way of incorporating relevant information, (about the roots and realities of the conflict between Bosnians, Serbians and Croatians and the sometimes malign influence of the United Nations) into his plot that adds immensely to the story, but doesn't slow it down. However, you will need to have patience with the first fifty pages, as Fesperman puts in place the context.

I totally agree with Ian Rankin, who ranked LIE IN THE DARK as "A quite astonishing first novel which injects the reader into the heart of the darkness which was Sarajevo at the height of the Yugoslav conflict."

A novel about CIA agents (but not exactly about espionage) set in Berlin in 1979 and the US in 2014. The main character, Helen, in the 1979 sections wasn't a particularly likeable character, and I found myself looking forward to the bits set in 2014, where her daughter Anna and the PI Henry were the protagonists.

A fairly easy read and quite fast moving, although there were a lot of characters to keep on top of.