Tangled Web UK Review August 1999
Lie in the Dark by
Dan Fesperman
hbk out July 99
Published by No Exit Press
at £16.99
Nothing could be more timely than a novel set at the heart of the Yugoslav conflict, and although Dan Fesperman's debut thriller is based in Sarajevo
during the Bosnian war, it has poignant and painful echoes of the disaster currently consuming Kosova.
Inspector Vlado Petric is a homicide investigator in besieged Sarajevo. And while others cynically scorn his concern for individual murder while officially endorsed slaughter pervades every hour, Petric is driven by the need to understand and to unravel. So when the Interior Ministry's chief of police is murdered, Petric refuses to be deflected from his dogged search for the truth, a search that takes him deep into uncharted waters of fear and danger.
A story of one man's desperate struggle to hang on to his integrity, Fesperman's unflinching portrait of the grim realities of ethnic conflict and the corruption that appears to be all that is capable of flourishing
places this novel firmly in the territory of Graham Greene and John Le Carre. An impressive debut that reaffirms the indomitability of the human spirit.
(
Val McDermid
- Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill)
