Lie In The Dark - Softcover

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.

is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and worked in its Berlin bureau during the years of civil war in former Yugoslavia, as well as in Afghanistan during the recent conflict for the paper. His first novel, Lie in the Dark, won the CWA John Creasey award for best first crime novel in 1999 and his second novel, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows, won the 2003 CWA Steel Dagger for Thriller of the Year. His new novel, The Warlord's Son is published by Bantam Press.