Book Synopsis:
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 sight lines of the most ruthless and powerful man at the agency. 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, when, in a farm town in Maryland, a young man is arrested for the double murder of his parents, and his sister takes it upon herself to find out why he did it.
Safehouse is available now in ebook and paperback, you can purchase a copy of bothhere.
My Review:
This was a fantastic spy thriller that I really enjoyed. The story is told in two parts one based in cold war Berlin and one in 2014. The Cold War has always held a lot of intrigue for me, not least because my dad was posted to Germany when the wall was still present. The tension is created naturally in this timeline as the there is a general feeling of mistrust and fear amoung the residents.
My favourite character was Helen who is the only women in an all male team. She’s struggling to do her job properly or get noticed. Her boss I very secist and doesn’t believe woman are capable of doing agent work, an opinion that is echoed by a lot of her colleagues. I really admired her feterdetermin to try to make a difference and make the best of the situation. I did also feel sorry for her as the lack of confidence her colleagues had in her must have been hard to handle.
This was quite a fast paced book for me and I really enjoyed watching the story unravel. I was pleased that Helen decided to try and solve the case and really wanted her to succeed. I kept reading, turning the pages faster and faster as the mystery was solved.
This is the first book by this author I have read and I really look forward to reading more from him in the future. If you like fast paced crime thrillers that have a bit of a classic feel to them you’ll like this book.
Huge thanks to Abby and Knoff publishers for my copy of this book via Netgalley and for inviting me onto the blog tour.
About The Author:
Dan Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to 30 countries and three war zones, beginning with the Persian Gulf War in 1991. But it was his introductory trip to the besieged city of Sarajevo in January 1994 that inspired his first novel, Lie in the Dark. In the ensuing years he has drawn on the exotica and intrigue of similarly far flung locales for setting, character and plot.
He grew up in North Carolina, where he was educated in the public schools of Charlotte before graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Anyone wondering about the university’s influence, particularly with regard to basketball, need only consult page 67 of The Small Boat of Great Sorrows(p. 79 in the UK edition).
As a journalist he worked at the Fayetteville (N.C.) Times, Durham Morning Herald, Charlotte News, Miami Herald, and The Sun and Evening Sun of Baltimore, contributing heartily to the eventual insolvency of two of those newspapers. But it was the Sun which catered most grandly to his wanderlust. Baltimore editors dispatched him to cover the Gulf War from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; then sent him to Berlin to run the paper’s Europe bureau during the years of the Yugoslav civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia; and in 2001 assigned him to cover events in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the wake of 9-11. Along the way he also reported from throughout the rest of Europe and the Middle East.
Memories of his three years in Germany eventually helped inspire The Arms Maker of Berlin, and his occasional travels to the Middle East deeply influenced The Amateur Spy. More recent travels, which he now does on his own dime, have contributed to his research for The Prisoner of Guantanamo (where he was a visitor, not an inmate) and Layover in Dubai. But the biggest influence on The Double Gamewas his longtime enthusiam for espionage novels, particularly the classics of the Cold War era.
His work abroad has come with a fair share of adventures, not the least of which include accepting the surrender, along with a colleague, of 10 forlorn and unarmed Iraqi soldiers in the Kuwaiti desert in 1991, and surviving a fatal ambush on a convoy of journalists traveling through Afghanistan in November 2001. (For details on both, read Dispatches).
Other than sheer laziness, it is hard to say with any accuracy what took him so long to begin writing any fiction apart from the occasional short story, usually of the variety routinely savaged by writing workshops. He has written those off and on since the age of 20, but didn’t begin his first novel until he was 38. Hoping to make up for lost time, he plans to be well over the hill by 65.
Unlike Skelly, the American correspondent depicted in The Warlord’s Son, Dan’s occasional vagabond existence has not rendered him too restless for steadfast marriage and fatherhood. Since 1988 he has been married to Liz Bowie, also a journalist, and they live in Baltimore. Their children, Emma and Will, have graduated from college and are making their mark at home and abroad.
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