Lie in the Dark

Dan Fesperman

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Winner of the John Creasey Award for the Best First Crime Novel 1999

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.

Category: Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction

Hardback

RRP: £16.99

ISBN: 9781901982664

Published: July 19, 1999

Extent: 282 pages

Paperback

RRP: £6.99

ISBN: 9781901982688

Published: August 1, 2003

Extent: 288 pages

Reviews

‘a rare wartime thriller’

Dante Ramos , New York Times

‘A quite astonishing first novel…If Fesperman had taken me any closer to the action I’d be demanding a flak jacket….This is a humane and moving book, a great war novel, a great crime novel. A great novel period’

Ian Rankin

‘This is the story of the investigation of a murder, but it’s also a wonderful portrayal of a city at war and one of the best books I’ve read in a long time’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Crime novel, war novel, modern historical novel – it’s a winner on every count’

MGS , Barcelona Review

‘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’

Val McDermid, author of '1989' , Tangled Web

Dan Fesperman

Dan Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to 30 countries and three war zones, including the Persian Gulf War in 1991. His introductory trip to the besieged city of Sarajevo in January 1994 inspired Lie in the Dark. As a journalist he worked at the Miami Herald and The Sun of Baltimore.

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