The Double Game [Paperback]

A Seattle TimesBest Mystery of the Year

ATimesof London Best Crime/Thriller Book of the Year

A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster reveals to up-and-coming journalist Bill Cage that he’d once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, a fan who grew up as a Foreign Service brat in the very cities where Lemaster set his plots, the story creates a brief but embarrassing sensation. More than two decades later, Cage receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper. Spiked with cryptic references to some of his and his father’s favorite old spy novels, the note is the first piece of a puzzle that will lead Cage back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in search of the truth, even as he discovers that the ghosts of Lemaster’s past eerily—and dangerously—still haunt the present. As the suspense steadily increases, decades of secrets begin to unravel.

“As fiendishly clever a spy story as you could hope for. . . . A guaranteed delight for any espionage fan.” —The Seattle Times, Best Mysteries of the Year

“[The Double Game’s] immersion in old-school espionage will thrill. . . . Fesperman is the most dependably entertaining, politically engaged writer you may never have heard of.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
 
“The Double Gameis not just a spy novel—it’s 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 ofAn American Spy
 
“Terrific. . . . A finely crafted espionage story and a dazzling homage to grand masters of spy fiction.” —The Globe and Mail

“Fans of spy novels will find much to lol“8