Investigator Petric makes his living from the dead. Lately business has been slow, what with the siege around Sarajevo. Condoned killing has displaced the crime of passion; his services with the civil police as a homicide investigator have been less in demand. Unluckily one premeditated death does land on the detective's desk. It is no abused lover or a distant sniper's victim but a government official - the chief of the interior ministry's police - shot dead at close range.In a thriller that recalls the first excitement of Martin Cruz Smith's Moscow and the Vienna of Graham Greene's The Third Man, author Dan Fesperman brilliantly renders the fragmented society and underworld of Sarajevo at war - the freelancing gangsters, guilty bystanders, drop-in correspondents, the bureaucrats frightened for their jobs and very lives - and he weaves through this torn cityscape one man's desperate, deadly pursuit of the wrong people in the worst places.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap:
"A mystery tinged by the politics of today...Brutally realistic." --U.S. News & World Report
Dan Fesperman, a journalist who reported from a number of war zones, has written a masterful murder mystery in the vein of early le Carré and Graham Greene.
Vlado Petric is a homicide investigator in war-torn Sarajevo. When he encounters an unidentified body near "sniper alley," he realizes that it is the body of Esmir Vitas, chief of the Interior Ministry's special police, and that Vitas has been killed not by any sniper's aim but by a bullet fired at almost pointblank range. Searching for the killer in this "city of murderers," Petric finds himself drawn into a conspriacy, the scope of which goes beyond anything he could possibly have imagined.
From the Back Cover:
"Fesperman makes Sarajevo his own, much as Martin Cruz Smith did with Moscow in Gorky Park and Red Square.... Just try to stop turning the pages." --The Orlando Sentinel
"Add Vlado Petric to the list of great fictional detectives. And add Dan Fesperman to the limited list of authors to display superior talent in a first novel." San Antonio Express-News
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBlack Swan
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 0552772682
- ISBN 13 9780552772686
- BindingPaperback
-
Rating