The Small Boat of Great Sorrows - Hardcover

Fesperman, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037541472X ISBN 13: 9780375414725

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

In Dan Fesperman’s highly praised Lie in the Dark (“A quite astonishing first novel”—Ian Rankin), we met Vlado Petric, a homicide detective in Sarajevo, a war-torn place where life itself had little worth.
Now, five years later, Petric has escaped to join his wife and daughter in Berlin, and is scratching out a meager but stable existence at a construction site. So when he’s recruited by Calvin Pine—an enigmatic American investigator for the war crimes tribunal at The Hague—to join a search mission back in the ruins of his homeland, he finds it hard to resist. They’re seeking a general responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica, but Petric is also being offered as bait to lure another suspect whose activities in World War II make the current generation of killers look like amateurs. Getting hotter on a trail that eventually leads across Europe, Petric soon finds that great political powers make unsavory alliances, and that investigating the mysteries of the past can be as dangerous as navigating the war zones of the present.

A gripping novel about legends and lies, about great deceptions and personal truths, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows is a galvanizing detective novel in a vein that brilliantly transcends the genre.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Deft and gripping. . . . Impeccably written and ably plotted. . . . The action is more or less nonstop." --The New York Times Books Review

"A literary thriller with historical persepctive. . . . A relentlessly crackling mystery and adventure tale. . . Fesperson's prose is vivid, almost breakneck in pace. . . . His descriptions of people and places are crisp, precise and memorable." --The Baltimore Sun

"A modern-day Odyssey that leads its hero through the harrowing Kafkaesque lanscapes of postwar Bosnia and post-Cold War Europe . . . A literary detective novel that thrills as much as it evokes admiration for the prose." --The Charlotte Observer

"A keep-'em-guessing plot, littered with hidden treasures, international intrigue, lusty old Croatian thugs, and late-night crypt openings." --Entertainment Weekly

"A wonderful book. . . . Timely, thoughtful and vividly written." - The Seattle Times

"A new standard for war-based thrillers." - The Los Angeles Times
"A dark and morally complex novel." - The Daily Telegraph

"A haunting sense of place and enough twists and turns to make the reader giddy. . . . This is not an ordinary thriller and this is enforced by the precision and the quality of the writing. Fesperman's . . . first-hand experience of war reporting and exhaustive research shine through." - The Birmingham Post

"[An] ambitious, morally complex thriller." - The Observer

"Fesperman tells his atmospheric tale with great elegance . . . [and] a sharp analytical curiosity." - The Guardian

"[A] fine follow-up to the equally fine Lie in the Dark." - The Orlando Sentinel

"A well-paced tale of deceit, manipulation and double-crossing." - The Spectator

About the Author

Dan Fesperman is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and worked in its Berlin bureau during the years of civil war in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in Afghanistan during the recent conflict. Lie in the Dark won the Crime Writers Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 037541472X
• ISBN 13: 9780375414725
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307