The Small Boat of Great Sorrows by
Dan Fesperman
hbk out November 03
Published by Bantam
at £12.99
With his first thriller, Lie In The Dark, Dan Fesperman won the Crime Writers Association’s John Creasey Dagger Award. With this, his second, he’s been short listed for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, for the year’s best thriller. Fesperman is a writer who is here to stay.
Our hero is Vlado Petric, a former detective who escaped the siege of Sarajevo and is now living in Berlin with his wife and daughter and working as a labourer. An American war crimes investigator tracks down Petric and enlists his help in the hunt for two fugitives: one involved in the massacre of Srebrenica and another who was party to crimes against humanity in the earlier conflict of the second world war. Petric’s search takes him to the Hague, to his beloved and ruined Bosnia and onto Italy. He becomes entangled in the politics of international justice, and the blood feuds of the Balkans but it is within his own family history that the bitterest truths emerge.
Dan Fesperman certainly knows his stuff: as foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun he was based in Berlin during the war in former Yugoslavia and has been to some of the world’s most troubled regions, among them Iraq, during the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Kuwait, the West Bank, Israel, Pakistan and Kosovo. His knowledge and research give impeccable authenticity to the story without ever getting in the way. A humane and moving international thriller.
Manchester Evening News 25.10.03
(
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries set on the mean streets of Manchester)
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows by
Dan Fesperman
