Dan Fesperman

Fesperman can always be counted on for a solid, fast-moving, well-developed story. In this case, a seasoned if somewhat independent-minded spy is assigned to play the role of the wife of an academic who has written a scholarly book that has scandalized fundamentalist Muslims and delighted people who don't like Muslims. She is meant to provide protection as he speaks at a conference of Near Eastern scholars and to the press in Germany. Things, of course, go wrong and characters turn out to be show more not quite who they seem. The time frame for the story is the late 1990s, just as Al Qaeda is preparing a world-shaking attack on the Western world.

In addition to being a good yarn, full of switchbacks and surprises, it's a nicely-drawn portrait of an intelligence community that has all the resources it needs but is too busy with infighting and lack of cultural competence to carry out their work successfully. There's also a cameo appearance of a character from Safe Houses.

I think The Prison of Guantanamo was the first time I discovered Fesperman. He continues to write smart and fast-moving books that avoid glamorizing espionage while thrusting readers into the midst of a well-resourced but flawed world of competing intelligence operations. show less

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: The Amateur Spy recasts the spy novel for the post-9/11 world—anyone might be watching, everyone is suspect.

Freeman Lockhart, a humanitarian aid worker, and his Bosnian wife, have just retired to a charming house on a Greek island. On their first night, violent intruders blackmail Freeman into spying on an old Palestinian friend living in Jordan. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a Palestinian-American named Aliyah Rahim is worried about her husband, show more who blames their daughter's death on the U.S. anti-terror policies. Aliyah learns that he is plotting a cataclysmic act of revenge; in a desperate effort to stop him, she flies to Jordan to meet her husband's co-conspirators. There she encounters Freeman neck-deep in his own investigation. As their paths intertwine, the story rises to its fast-paced, explosive climax.


My Review: My bestie Suzanne inspired me to read this book, and I liked it. I did. I liked it.

Excellent pacing! Exciting plotting! Adequate dialogue!

But, after a few nights away from it pondering why I am so unmoved by it, I realized something. I am unpleasantly aware of a resonance with the later real-life doings of Zeitoun, he of the non-fiction Eggers book about injustice, racial profiling, and Katrina's aftermath.

I wasn't unmoved after all. I was unhappy.

The Palestinian dad who loses his daughter to perceived bureaucratic idiocy also loses his loyalty to the American Dream and to the Ideal World he came here to find. Well, yeah. Push a man hard enough, he falls over. Losing your illusions is a painful process, and for an adult to go through it...! I've heard a lot of unpleasantness about Zeitoun's apparent descent into extremism. It all carries, as does Fesperman's doctor's descent, an unspoken whiff of “look, he's finally tipped into Islamic Fundamentalism just like They Always Do!”

I don't think They Always Do anything. I don't like the insidious, unexamined response of “well, what did you expect?” to these men's extreme responses to extreme abuses and losses. I promise you that a father who loses a child is a deranged, angry, haunted man. He will never, ever be the same as he was again. And if there is a handy, culpable party around, well guess what? Blame will be laid. I think I would feel the same way if my country, the place I CHOSE to live and work and become part of, slammed me into prison for being me.

It's certainly always true that thrillers and mysteries require an Other, an Enemy, or they're pointless. I know that espionage is about Otherness taken to the extreme. I'm aware that the entire experience of a chase is about stakes, what's at risk, why the chase is occurring, or there's no point.

That said, I can take not one thing away from Mr. Fesperman in his making of the book, and in his choice of a story. That I don't want to read this story isn't a thing in the world to do with him, and that I DID read the story is a testament to his talent as a thriller-maker. show less

What an interesting read - dual narratives, moving back and forth between 1979 -Germany CIA /Langley, VA CIA hdqtrs and then 2014, the daughter of the protagonist, and an investigator - trying to get the bottom of her mental disabled brother's complete breakdown: he shoots both his parents, and then calmly sits on front porch when authorities discover the grisly double murder. Part CIA-Cold War drama, part murder mystery investigation - compelling characters and a real twist in the last show more chapter... why isn't this a limited film series or a movie? Holy cow -it'd be sooo suspenseful. Have to pay attention - the narratives shift back & forth and it's a bit drawn out in the 2014 part, but still worth the read! show less

Dan Fesperman is not a new-to-me author. I have read three of his previous novels (Lie in the Dark, The Prisoner of Guantanamo, and The Amateur Spy), each of which I enjoyed because of their complicated plots and Fesperman’s writing style. But because I decided to go with the audiobook version of Safe Houses this time around, I learned something about Fesperman I probably would never have otherwise picked up on: if this man couldn’t write a lick, he could make one heck of a living show more narrating the audiobooks of other writers. He is so good a narrator that I had to double-check to make sure that it was really him doing the reading. The way that Fesperman changes voices, accents, gender-inflections, and the like, makes Safe Houses one of my all-time favorite audiobooks. Fesperman proves here that not only can he write a good story, he can tell a good story.

It all starts in 1979 West Berlin when Helen Abell, a 22-year-old CIA secretary/clerk who has been assigned the task of overseeing the Agency’s Berlin safe house network, in a single day overhears two conversations that greatly trouble her. Helen is only in the safehouse to make sure that things are still in order since her last visit. While upstairs checking the integrity of the recording equipment in the house, she hears two unidentifiable agents enter downstairs for a meeting that is not on the schedule she maintains for the Agency. She is mystified by what she hears – and inadvertently records – but she senses that something is very, very wrong about their conversation. A few hours later, when she returns to the safe house to erase the damning tape, Helen overhears – and witnesses – something even more personally disturbing.

Now, Helen is on the radar of a rogue CIA agent who will do anything to protect his reputation and status inside the Agency. This is a man who has a long memory, friends within the Agency who are just as ruthless as him, and all the tools he needs to eliminate anyone who threatens him. He has just about everything but a conscious. His memory is, in fact, so long that Helen will never feel safe for the rest of her life.

Flash forward to a chicken farm in present day Maryland where a young man has just been arrested for the brutal double-murder of his parents. The young man in question has been under psychiatric care most of his life, but he has never indicated a capacity for violent behavior. His sister knows that something has gone terribly, unexpectedly, wrong in her family home, and she wants to know why it happened. But when she and the investigator she hires suddenly find themselves running for their own lives, it begins to look as if she won’t live long enough to get any answers.

Bottom Line: Considering everything we’ve learned recently about the CIA and the FBI, Safe Houses is a thriller that would have seemed more farfetched in 2018 when it was published than it does today. That said, this is a solid thriller centered around three young women who decide they can no longer ignore the sordid behavior of a handful of their male colleagues. The women are willing to risk their careers and their lives to set things right – and some of them will indeed lose both. show less