The Amateur Spy, a novel by Dan Fesperman, published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a Borzoi Book, 367 pgs., hardcover, $24.95.  ISBN: 978-1-4000-4467-2.  Release date: March 5, 2008.
        Right off, I have to say that this is one of the best thrillers I have read in years.  If I had to pick out the main reason why this novel engaged me from the start, it would be its “readability,” one of the most important elements in crafting good fiction.  From first paragraph to last, the unpreten-tious yet intelligent first-person narration, the strong sense of place, atmosphere and character-izations, added up to a most satisfying read.
        The story: Freeman Lockhart, 55 and his Bosnian-born wife, Mila, 37, are burned-out U.N. humanitarian aid workers who decide to “retire” to their recently-purchased retreat on the Aegean island of Karos.  On their first night back, they are roughly awakened by three intruders who spirit Freeman away to a nearby location.  With threats of revealing a haunting secret he has long kept from his wife, they blackmail him into spying on a former friend and co-worker, Omar al-Baroody.  Reluctant-ly, the “amateur spy” heads to Jordan under the guise of accepting a “temporary” position in al-Baroody’s organization.  Meanwhile, in Washing-ton D.C., Abbas Rahim, a Palestinian-American, and prosperous physician, and his wife, Aliyah, are still grieving over the death of their daughter, who was accidentally killed while vacationing abroad.  Abbas blames her death on the bureaucratic machinations of State Department and other officials following the turmoil of 9-11.  Over-whelmed by bitterness, he plans a diabolical   act of terrorism as revenge.  Aliyah gets wind of his suicidal plans, and her efforts to thwart them takes her to Jordan.  There, Freeman and Aliyah’s paths converge, as they try to wade through the complexities and illusions that exemplify Middle Eastern politics, to prevent catastrophe.
        Dan Fesperman’s travels as a foreign correspondent and writer have taken him to thirty countries and three war zones, and this experience adds a distinct authenticity to his work. His novel, Lie in the Dark, won the Crime Writers’ Associa-tion of Britain’s John Creasy Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel.  The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won their Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller, and The Prisoner of Guantanamo won the Dashiell Hammet Award from the International Association of Crime Writers.
        Highly recommended.
  
Rules of Deception by Christopher Reich, published by Doubleday, approx. 375 pgs., $24.95, ISBN: 978-0-385-52406-3.  Release date: July 15, 2008.
        From the author of Numbered Account and The Patriots Club, which won the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Novel in 2006, Christopher Reich returns with a story involving international espionage and a terrorist plot to blow up a plane on Swiss soil.
        Dr. Jonathan Ransom, world class mountaineer and surgeon for Doctors Without Borders, and his wife, Emma, are climbing the Swiss Alps when a blizzard sets in.  In their attempt to get off the mountain and escape the storm, Emma takes a wrong turn and ends up with a broken femur.  Ransom leaves her with whatever provisions he can find in his backpack and skies down the mountain to find a rescue team. When he returns with help, she has disappeared.  They find her lifeless body at the bottom of a deep crevasse; Jonathan is devastated, even more so when the rescue team informs him that they cannot retrieve her until the weather improves.
        The next day, he receives an envelope addressed to his wife; inside are two baggage

 claim tickets.  He travels to a remote railway station to claim the baggage, and is assaulted on the way out, by what turns out to be two Swiss police officers. Ransom fights back, leaving one of them dead.
        Now he is on the run, subject of an interna-tional manhunt.  His only chance for survival is to uncover the truth behind the secret his wife kept from him.  Ransom’s quest is impeded by several betrayals, a goodly amount of intrigue, assassi-nation, and multiple high-tech conspiracies—leading to the shocking awareness that no one, including Ransom’s beloved Emma, is who or what they appear to be.
        While the plot thickens and the pages turn, the reader is subjected to a number of sly, though well-written manipulations that test believability, including several bizarre car chases and physical feats that hint of Superman.  Perhaps this explains why the film rights have been optioned by Paramount/Lorenzo di Bonaventura Productions.
  
Still Waters: A Mystery, by Nigel McCrery, published by Pantheon Books, $23.95, 288 pgs., ISBN/EAN: 978-0-307-37703-6.  Release date: July 15, 2008.
        A former police officer before entering Cambridge University, and creator of the cult classic BBC television mystery series, Silent Witness, as well as author of a number of  previous novels, including the Samantha Ryan mysteries, Nigel McCrery introduces a new detective, DCI Mark Lapslie, whose neurological condition, synaesthesia, causes him to “taste” sounds.
        Lapslie is on indefinite sick leave due to his “affliction,” when he is suddenly called back to investigate the strange circumstances surrounding a car crash, where the badly decayed body of an old woman, wrapped in shredded plastic sheeting and missing the tips of her fingers, has been unearthed at the scene.  Detective sergeant, Emma Bradbury, has been assigned to assist him.
        Meanwhile, Violet Chambers, a serial killer of elderly women makes her debut.  She picks out her victims carefully, stalks then befriends them—mostly lonely, single or widowed, older women—dominating the relationship and making herself indispensable.  Once she has accumulated the victims’ possessions and assets, she poisons them, using her own plant-based concoctions.  After she disposes of the body (in a most bizarre way), she assumes the victim’s identity and relocates.  Now she has found refuge in the small village of Leyston-by-Naze, near the sea and is making plans to hunt again.
        Lapslie and his detective sergeant are a step behind her.
        Alternating between the killer’s perambula-tions and the detectives’ investigation, McCrery weaves an eerie, gritty and oft times frightening tale.  As exemplified by the Prologue (not for the squeamish), he captures the madness and ruthlessness of Violet Chambers, now “Daisy Wilson,” with uncanny perceptiveness; the detectives dogged pursuit of the killer suffers in contrast.  Maybe it’s the overemphasis of DCI Lapslie’s “affliction” that gets in the way and allows the story to sag at times.  Or the mind-numbing details of the investigation that send one’s attention flagging—until the powers-that-be suddenly try to remove DCI Lapslie from the case.  But Lapslie has figured out why and evades them.  He follows his leads, eventually confronting the madwoman herself at the doorstep of her latest victim who is now in the throes of death.  A life
and death struggle between Lapslie and “Daisy” marks the beginning of the end of this ever-twisting story.
       
                                  Copyright © Sandy Raschke