Bücher von Dan Fesperman

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when she overhears a meeting between two people unfamiliar to her speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her in the sight lines of the most ruthless and dangerous man at the agency. What she has witnessed will have repercussions that reach across decades and continents into the present day, when, in a farm town in Maryland, a young man is arrested for the double murder of his parents, and his sister takes it upon herself to find out why he did it.

The first thing Woodrow Cain sees when he steps off the train in New York City on February 9, 1942, is smoke from an ocean liner in flames in the harbor. It's the Normandie, and word on the street is that it was burned by German saboteurs. ';Ten lousy minutes in New York and already his new life felt as full of loss and betrayal as the one he'd left behind.' What he left behind in a small North Carolina town was a wife who'd left him, a daughter in the care of his sister, and a career as a police officer marred by questions surrounding his partner's murder. When he gets a job with the NYPD, he wants to believe it's the beginning of a new life, though he suspects that the past is as tenacious as ';a parasite in the bloodstream.' It's on the job that Cain comes in contact with a man who calls himself Danziger. He has the appearance of a ';crackpot,' but he speaks five languages, has the manners of a man of means and educationand he appears to be the one person who can help Cain identify a body just found floating in the Hudson River. But who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side';a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting' for his clients, and perhaps for himself: he hints at a much more worldly past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse. For one thing, he knows how the dead man was involved in New York City's ';Little Deutschland,' where swastikas were proudly displayed just months before. And he also seems to know how the investigation will put Cainand perhaps his daughter and the woman he's fallen forin harm's way. But even Danziger can't know that the more he and Cain investigate, the nearer they come to the center of a citywide web of possibly traitorous corruption from which neither of them may get out alive.