The Double Game
Author: Dan Fesperman
A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster reveals to up-and-coming journalist Bill Cage that he’d once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, a fan who grew up as a Foreign Service brat in the very cities where Lemaster set his plots, the story creates a brief but embarrassing sensation. More than two decades later, Cage receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper. Spiked with cryptic references to some of his and his father’s favorite old spy novels, the note is the first piece of a puzzle that will lead Cage back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in search of the truth, even as he discovers that the ghosts of Lemaster’s past eerily—and dangerously—still haunt the present. As the suspense steadily increases, decades of secrets begin to unravel…
Vintage Crine/Black Lizard 2013
If you're interested in further rights to this title, please click here.
Reviews
Seeing New York through Cain’s eyes gives us a bracing new perspective as his efforts to identify the corpse take him from the German enclave of Yorkville in Upper Manhattan to the tenements of the Lower East Side, where a mysterious man called Maximilian Danziger performs a unique service. Old and frail but vibrantly alive in Fesperman’s penetrating portrait, Danziger charges a modest fee to write letters for illiterate clients frantic for news of their relatives back in Eastern Europe. Fesperman’s prose is almost photographic, creating vignettes saturated with color and humming with life.
Fesperman shows a skilled hand at creating the detail of wartime New York—the vitality of the German Yorkville section, the hysteria following the bombing of the luxury liner the Normandie, the influence of mobster Meyer Lansky ... the likable and well-drawn Cain will go over well with readers, especially those fond of historicals.
Fesperman’s troop of characters, historic and fictional, makes New York come alive with conspiracy and mystery. At the center of this labyrinth is the cryptic life of Danziger, a Sherlock-like creation who knows many of the answers and hides his past by manipulating information. As his story unfolds through a police file acquired by Cain, the story kicks into thriller overdrive. Fesperman gives us a well-crafted novel steeped in the politics and street life of 1940s New York, and in the letter writer, he's created a character who will stay with you long after the last shot is fired.