Dan Fesperman – författare

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.

When Nat Turnbull, a history professor who specializes in the German resistance, gets the news that his estranged mentor, Gordon Wolfe, has been arrested for possession of stolen World War II archives, he’s hardly surprised that, even at the age of eighty-four, Gordon has gotten himself in trouble. 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.”

Yet key documents are still missing, and Nat believes Gordon has hidden them. The FBI agrees, and when Gordon is found dead in jail, the Bureau dispatches Nat to track down the material, which has also piqued the interest of several dangerous competitors. As he follows a trail of cryptic clues left behind by Gordon, assisted by an attractive academic with questionable motives, Nat’s quest takes him to Bern and Berlin, where his path soon crosses that of Kurt Bauer, an aging German arms merchant still hoarding his own wartime secrets. As their stories—and Gordon’s—intersect across half a century, long-buried exploits of deceit, devotion, and doomed resistance begin working their way to the surface. And as the stakes rise, so do the risks....

Sam Keller has been enlisted by his V.P. for Corporate Security and Investigation to spy on another employee while they’re traveling for the company. Ordinarily careful to a fault, Sam decides to live it up. What better spot for business-class hedonism than boomtown Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slope of a shopping mall.

But when Sam’s charge is murdered during a night on the town, it is only the first in a series of bewildering events that plunge him waist-deep into a lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, crooked cops, consuls, and corporate players.

Offering a chancy way out is Anwar Sharaf, the unlikeliest of detectives. A former pearl diver and gold smuggler with an undignified demeanor, Sharaf is sometimes as baffled as Sam by the changes to his homeland, especially as they are embodied in the behavior of his rebelliously independent—and hauntingly beautiful—daughter. But he knows where the levers of power reside. As the unlikely duo work their way toward the heart of the case, each man must confront the darkest forces threatening Dubai from within.

Here is Dan Fesperman’s most suspenseful novel yet: a stunning portrait of a city whose mysterious rhythm (“like the precision throb of an artificial heart, clicking and insistent, yet cool to the touch”) is underscored by the insistent clashing of old and new.