It becomes more and more difficult to establish a reputation in
the fearfully overcrowded field of crime-writing, but Dan Fesperman
looks set to make his mark with this remarkable debut novel. Following
a long and honourable trail, Fesperman utilises a journalistic
background (he has "done time" in the Balkans) to conjure
a sense of atmosphere that has all the tension of Sarajevo at
war. His protagonist, the investigator Petric, has found that
with the siege of the city, state killing has marginalised the
significance of crimes of passion, and his own career as a homicide
investigator is in stasis. But when a government official - the
chief of police of the interior ministry - is shot dead at close
range, Petric is soon faced with the daunting task of making this
one death seem significant in a face of mass carnage. There are
echoes here of (unsurprisingly) Cruz Smith's Gorky Park,
and Graham Greene's shade may be detected in the background. The
large and disparate cast of characters, however, is very much
the author's own. One incidental pleasure of the book is the wrong-footing
of the reader: we're never quite sure to what genre it belongs.
But there is nothing wrong with that - and this is one to cherish.
