The Double Game

A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster revealed to up-and-coming journalist Bill Cage that hed once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, a Foreign Service brat who grew up in the very cities where Lemasters books were set, the news story created a brief but embarrassing sensation and heralded the beginning of the end of his career in journalism. More than two decades later, Cage, now a lonely, disillusioned PR man, receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper into Lemasters pronouncement. Spiked with cryptic references to some of Cages favorite spy novels, the note is the first of many literary bread crumbs that lead him back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, each instruction drawing him closer to the complex truth, each giving rise to more questions: Why is beautiful Litzi Strauss back in his life after thirty years? How much of his fathers job involved the CIA? As the events of Lemasters past eerilyand dangerouslybegin intersecting with those of Cages own, a long stalemate of secrecy may finally be coming to an end. A story about spies and their secrets, fathers and sons, lovers and fate, duplicity and loyalty, The Double Game ingeniously taps the espionage classics of the Cold War to build a spellbinding maze of intrigue. It is Dan Fespermans most audacious, suspenseful, and satisfying novel yet. Amazon.com Review Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012 : The Double Game begins as a playful spy caper within a spy caper, in which clues to a mystery are found in the pages and plots of old spy novels. Okay, clever enough. But the story quickly becomes more refreshingly and unexpectedly mysterious with each turn of the page, and I realized that Fesperman has achieved something remarkable here. Hes turned the spy novel on its head, while paying homage to the genre, and at the same time giving us an unlikely protagonist who discovers that hes lived his entire life in a world where fact and fiction were virtually indistinguishable. Innovative and evocative. -- Neal Thompson Review A spy novel about spy novels, calculated to deliver a maximum dose of fun for the genre fan . . . Breezing through The Double Game is like encountering 30 spy classics . . . Fespermans book is a triple, quadruple, quintuple game, thrilling and fun. *The Daily Beast The Double Game is not just a spy novelits a love letter to the genre, renditioning the unwary reader and dropping him into a dizzying pastiche of classic espionage, cleverly woven into a thrilling story. Brilliantly executed and a joy from start to finish. Olen Steinhauer, author of *An American Spy A beautifully written book [from] the highly accomplished Fesperman, a veteran of the sophisticated, literary novel of intrigue. *Publishers Weekly