The Small Boat of Great Sorrows [Hardcover]

Vlado Petric, an ex-detective from Sarajevo, now lives in the newly reunited Berlin and works on construction sites. It's a life, but only just. And then he goes home one night to find Calvin Pine waiting for him. Pine is from the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and he wants Petric to go back to Sarajevo and help with a complex plan to effect the arrest of a Serb general implicated in the massacre at Srebenica. Petric agrees, even though he's fairly sure there's more going on than he's being allowed to know. The book has a plot as tortuous and snakelike as Balkan politics itself, and the feeling of unease, of constantly walking on shifting sands, never knowing who to trust, is palpable - a brilliant follow-up the John Creasey Dagger Award-winning Lie in the Dark. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'This tight intelligent thriller chillingly describes a world in which justice is always a negotiation between highly compromised alternatives.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Hugely satisfying. This book has all the power of a great thriller, with the intelligence and humanity of the best serious fiction' Fergal Keane --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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.

Vlado Petric, former detective in war-torn Sarajevo, has left his beloved homeland to join his wife and daughter in Germany, where he scratches a meagre living among the dust of former conflicts on the building sites of the new Berlin.

Returning home one evening, he finds an enigmatic American investigator waiting for him in the small apartment he now shares with his wife and daughter. The investigator, Calvin Pine, works for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he tells Petric that they want him to go to The Hague. It doesn't take Petric long to accept, especially when Pine tells him they are after a big fish: one of the men who they think is responsible for the terrible massacre of Srebrenica.

What Petric doesn't know is that he is also being used as bait to lure into the open a murderer from the previous generation; a man whose activities in the Second World War makes the current generation of killers look like amateurs.

As Petric travels from modern-day Germany, through the ruins of Bosnia, to the peaceful hills of southern Italy where bitter, unresolved tensions still crackle beneath the surface, the stakes become all too personal. And he soon finds that investigating the mysteries of the past can be every bit as dangerous as finding his way through the war zones of the present.

A gripping novel about legends and lies, about great deceptions and small personal truths, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows is fiction of the highest order. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Dan Fesperman Dan Fesperman is the foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and worked in its Berlin bureau during the years of civil war in former Yugoslavia. He has just returned to Baltimore having covered the Afghanistan conflict for the paper. His first novel, Lie in the Dark, was published in the UK by No Exit, and won the CWA John Creasey award for best first crime novel in 1998. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.