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The Amateur Spy
The Amateur Spy —Dan Fesperman’s most galvanizing thriller yet—takes us to a flashpoint of global intrigue, recasting the spy novel for the post–9/11 Anyone might be watching; everyone is suspect.
Burned out by years of humanitarian-aid work, Freeman and Mila Lockhart have retreated to an idyllic Greek island. But on the first night of their new life they are surprised by three intruders who seem to know everything about Freeman—including a haunting secret he has long kept from Mila. They use it to blackmail him into spying on an old Palestinian friend in Jordan. Overnight, Freeman is plunged into the maelstrom of the Middle East and is quickly in over his head.
In suburban Washington, D.C., meanwhile, a prosperous Palestinian-American couple, Abbas and Aliyah Rahim, are still grieving for their daughter, accidentally killed while vacationing abroad. Abbas, a surgeon whose patients number among the nation’s elite, blames her death on the bureaucratic machinations of overly suspicious officials. Aliyah fears he may be reeling toward fanaticism, and her efforts to avert this take her to Jordan. Like Freeman, she is soon overwhelmed by the region’s dangerous passions and complexities.
As their paths converge, Freeman and Aliyah—both desperately worried about the loved ones they left behind—must swiftly separate fact from illusion, enemy from friend. The consequences of failure could be catastrophic. . . .
Burned out by years of humanitarian-aid work, Freeman and Mila Lockhart have retreated to an idyllic Greek island. But on the first night of their new life they are surprised by three intruders who seem to know everything about Freeman—including a haunting secret he has long kept from Mila. They use it to blackmail him into spying on an old Palestinian friend in Jordan. Overnight, Freeman is plunged into the maelstrom of the Middle East and is quickly in over his head.
In suburban Washington, D.C., meanwhile, a prosperous Palestinian-American couple, Abbas and Aliyah Rahim, are still grieving for their daughter, accidentally killed while vacationing abroad. Abbas, a surgeon whose patients number among the nation’s elite, blames her death on the bureaucratic machinations of overly suspicious officials. Aliyah fears he may be reeling toward fanaticism, and her efforts to avert this take her to Jordan. Like Freeman, she is soon overwhelmed by the region’s dangerous passions and complexities.
As their paths converge, Freeman and Aliyah—both desperately worried about the loved ones they left behind—must swiftly separate fact from illusion, enemy from friend. The consequences of failure could be catastrophic. . . .
384 pages, Hardcover
First published July 12, 2007
24 people are currently reading
241 people want to read
About the author
Dan Fesperman
20 books418 followersDan Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to thirty countries and three war zones. Lie in the Dark won the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain’s John Creasey 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 Guantánamo won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers. He lives in Baltimore.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
November 14, 2012
Rating: 3* of five
The Book Description: The Amateur Spy recasts the spy novel for the post-9/11 world—anyone might be watching, everyone is suspect.
Freeman Lockhart, a humanitarian aid worker, and his Bosnian wife, have just retired to a charming house on a Greek island. On their first night, violent intruders blackmail Freeman into spying on an old Palestinian friend living in Jordan. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a Palestinian-American named Aliyah Rahim is worried about her husband, who blames their daughter's death on the U.S. anti-terror policies. Aliyah learns that he is plotting a cataclysmic act of revenge; in a desperate effort to stop him, she flies to Jordan to meet her husband's co-conspirators. There she encounters Freeman neck-deep in his own investigation. As their paths intertwine, the story rises to its fast-paced, explosive climax.
My Review: My bestie Suzanne inspired me to read this book, and I liked it. I did. I liked it.
Excellent pacing! Exciting plotting! Adequate dialogue!
But, after a few nights away from it pondering why I am so unmoved by it, I realized something. I am unpleasantly aware of a resonance with the later real-life doings of Zeitoun, he of the non-fiction Eggers book about injustice, racial profiling, and Katrina's aftermath.
I wasn't unmoved after all. I was unhappy.
The Palestinian dad who loses his daughter to perceived bureaucratic idiocy also loses his loyalty to the American Dream and to the Ideal World he came here to find. Well, yeah. Push a man hard enough, he falls over. Losing your illusions is a painful process, and for an adult to go through it...! I've heard a lot of unpleasantness about Zeitoun's apparent descent into extremism. It all carries, as does Fesperman's doctor's descent, an unspoken whiff of “look, he's finally tipped into Islamic Fundamentalism just like They Always Do!”
I don't think They Always Do anything. I don't like the insidious, unexamined response of “well, what did you expect?” to these men's extreme responses to extreme abuses and losses. I promise you that a father who loses a child is a deranged, angry, haunted man. He will never, ever be the same as he was again. And if there is a handy, culpable party around, well guess what? Blame will be laid. I think I would feel the same way if my country, the place I CHOSE to live and work and become part of, slammed me into prison for being me.
It's certainly always true that thrillers and mysteries require an Other, an Enemy, or they're pointless. I know that espionage is about Otherness taken to the extreme. I'm aware that the entire experience of a chase is about stakes, what's at risk, why the chase is occurring, or there's no point.
That said, I can take not one thing away from Mr. Fesperman in his making of the book, and in his choice of a story. That I don't want to read this story isn't a thing in the world to do with him, and that I DID read the story is a testament to his talent as a thriller-maker.
The Book Description: The Amateur Spy recasts the spy novel for the post-9/11 world—anyone might be watching, everyone is suspect.
Freeman Lockhart, a humanitarian aid worker, and his Bosnian wife, have just retired to a charming house on a Greek island. On their first night, violent intruders blackmail Freeman into spying on an old Palestinian friend living in Jordan. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a Palestinian-American named Aliyah Rahim is worried about her husband, who blames their daughter's death on the U.S. anti-terror policies. Aliyah learns that he is plotting a cataclysmic act of revenge; in a desperate effort to stop him, she flies to Jordan to meet her husband's co-conspirators. There she encounters Freeman neck-deep in his own investigation. As their paths intertwine, the story rises to its fast-paced, explosive climax.
My Review: My bestie Suzanne inspired me to read this book, and I liked it. I did. I liked it.
Excellent pacing! Exciting plotting! Adequate dialogue!
But, after a few nights away from it pondering why I am so unmoved by it, I realized something. I am unpleasantly aware of a resonance with the later real-life doings of Zeitoun, he of the non-fiction Eggers book about injustice, racial profiling, and Katrina's aftermath.
I wasn't unmoved after all. I was unhappy.
The Palestinian dad who loses his daughter to perceived bureaucratic idiocy also loses his loyalty to the American Dream and to the Ideal World he came here to find. Well, yeah. Push a man hard enough, he falls over. Losing your illusions is a painful process, and for an adult to go through it...! I've heard a lot of unpleasantness about Zeitoun's apparent descent into extremism. It all carries, as does Fesperman's doctor's descent, an unspoken whiff of “look, he's finally tipped into Islamic Fundamentalism just like They Always Do!”
I don't think They Always Do anything. I don't like the insidious, unexamined response of “well, what did you expect?” to these men's extreme responses to extreme abuses and losses. I promise you that a father who loses a child is a deranged, angry, haunted man. He will never, ever be the same as he was again. And if there is a handy, culpable party around, well guess what? Blame will be laid. I think I would feel the same way if my country, the place I CHOSE to live and work and become part of, slammed me into prison for being me.
It's certainly always true that thrillers and mysteries require an Other, an Enemy, or they're pointless. I know that espionage is about Otherness taken to the extreme. I'm aware that the entire experience of a chase is about stakes, what's at risk, why the chase is occurring, or there's no point.
That said, I can take not one thing away from Mr. Fesperman in his making of the book, and in his choice of a story. That I don't want to read this story isn't a thing in the world to do with him, and that I DID read the story is a testament to his talent as a thriller-maker.
May 26, 2018
Another good story by Dan. Last 30 pages were page turning action!
December 7, 2009
Got plot?
It’s the one thing a thriller writer has to have, and the one thing a reviewer must not reveal very much of. Which makes reviewing thrillers difficult because, frankly, most thrillers don’t have much of anything else.
Dan Fesperman has two good plots in his new novel, “The Amateur Spy.” Here are their setups.
Freeman Lockhart, a retired United Nations aid worker, is blackmailed into spying on an old friend. He doesn’t even know which country he’s spying for, or what his handlers, who seem to be American, hope to find out. He just knows that if he doesn’t do what they tell him to do, he risks the exposure of a secret from his past and that of his Bosnian-born wife, Mila.
Aliyah Rahim, an Arab-American woman, learns that her husband, Abbas, a prominent surgeon in Washington, D.C., is planning to do something terrible. The suspicion and surveillance they’ve experienced since 9/11 has caused him to act more and more erratically, especially after the death of their daughter. Aliyah agrees to help Abbas with his plans, hoping that she can somehow prevent them from taking effect.
The paths of Freeman and Aliyah will cross in Amman, Jordan. But their plot lines won’t entangle until the final pages of the novel, in the usual breathless rush of a thriller’s climax. If plot is all you ask of a thriller, “The Amateur Spy” has plenty of it. In that respect, the novel sometimes feels as formulaic as a cliffhanger like TV’s “24.”
But Fesperman’s novel transcends the formulas. He uses suspense to draw you into the world in which his characters live, which unsettlingly happens to be the one we live in. As a foreign news reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Fesperman witnessed his share of the world’s conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Middle East. And he has carried his reporter’s techniques and insight into a series of novels – this is his fifth -- set in those lands and elsewhere. His most recent novel, “The Prisoner of Guantánamo,” did more than most mere journalists have done to shine a light on that dark and troubling place.
Every action of “The Amateur Spy” is rooted in a locale, whether it’s Amman or Jerusalem or Athens or Washington. And his characters are acutely sensitive to the place and the moment. Aliyah, for example, arriving in Amman for the first time, “hadn’t expected all the hills, with their crowded, blocky architecture, everything rendered in watercolor shades of tan and off-white. Or so it seemed in the slanting light. The air had a strange smell, which stirred a vague familiarity. It was the dry, smoky character, she supposed, which took her back to distant times she hadn’t revisited in ages.”
But what especially lifts Fesperman’s thriller above the confines of its genre is the author’s empathy for those caught in the crossfire of the world’s conflicts. That he makes his narrator-protagonist a former UN aid worker, a would-be neutral, is no random choice. The operative irony of the novel is that Freeman (whose name is only a couple of consonants and a little anagramming away from “Fesperman”) wants to be a free man – one without a country -- because he has seen what harm can be done by the zeal of patriots and ideologues. But when he arrives in Amman – “a city of loose talk and stealthy listeners” -- he is instantly reminded how difficult the neutral pose can be. When he orders a Coke, the waiter tells him, with “a remark that from him sounded like an admonition,” that the restaurant serves only Pepsi. And then Freeman remembers an old rumor in the Arab world that the Coca-Cola logo said “No Mohammad, No Mecca” if you turned it backward. “I had forgotten what it was like working in a place where even your most innocent choice might be held against you.”
Worse things than a waiter’s scorn happen to Freeman and Aliyah and others in the novel, but the author’s alertness to such smaller tensions makes “The Amateur Spy” come alive. Fesperman has mastered his genre, but he often breaks out of its confines. You can sense him trying to move away from Tom Clancy and John Grisham and toward writers like Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, writers with a nuanced and ambivalent vision of the world and its conflicts. (Aliyah’s plight is reminiscent of that of Winnie Verloc, the anarchist’s wife in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” although Aliyah shrugs off the passivity in which Winnie was trapped.)
Throughout the novel, Fesperman reminds us that the world is a lot more complicated than the TV pundits, politicians and lockstep superpatriots would have us believe. Sometimes he does it with sly wit, as when Freeman hears a group in a hotel bar celebrating their release from the daytime fast of Ramadan: “The revelers began clapping to the beat, drowning out the muezzin, and the band broke into the disco standby ‘I Will Survive.’ Interesting to think of it as some sort of Palestinian anthem.”
And more than once he reminds us of the world’s pain, as when Aliyah reflects that she can’t tell her friend Nancy “that sometimes it gave her comfort to see news footage of American mothers grieving for their lost soldier boys, killed in Iraq. It wasn’t that she took pleasure in the deaths. It was that she thought her country needed this kind of sorrow to keep it humble, because that was how it worked in the rest of the world.”
It’s the one thing a thriller writer has to have, and the one thing a reviewer must not reveal very much of. Which makes reviewing thrillers difficult because, frankly, most thrillers don’t have much of anything else.
Dan Fesperman has two good plots in his new novel, “The Amateur Spy.” Here are their setups.
Freeman Lockhart, a retired United Nations aid worker, is blackmailed into spying on an old friend. He doesn’t even know which country he’s spying for, or what his handlers, who seem to be American, hope to find out. He just knows that if he doesn’t do what they tell him to do, he risks the exposure of a secret from his past and that of his Bosnian-born wife, Mila.
Aliyah Rahim, an Arab-American woman, learns that her husband, Abbas, a prominent surgeon in Washington, D.C., is planning to do something terrible. The suspicion and surveillance they’ve experienced since 9/11 has caused him to act more and more erratically, especially after the death of their daughter. Aliyah agrees to help Abbas with his plans, hoping that she can somehow prevent them from taking effect.
The paths of Freeman and Aliyah will cross in Amman, Jordan. But their plot lines won’t entangle until the final pages of the novel, in the usual breathless rush of a thriller’s climax. If plot is all you ask of a thriller, “The Amateur Spy” has plenty of it. In that respect, the novel sometimes feels as formulaic as a cliffhanger like TV’s “24.”
But Fesperman’s novel transcends the formulas. He uses suspense to draw you into the world in which his characters live, which unsettlingly happens to be the one we live in. As a foreign news reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Fesperman witnessed his share of the world’s conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Middle East. And he has carried his reporter’s techniques and insight into a series of novels – this is his fifth -- set in those lands and elsewhere. His most recent novel, “The Prisoner of Guantánamo,” did more than most mere journalists have done to shine a light on that dark and troubling place.
Every action of “The Amateur Spy” is rooted in a locale, whether it’s Amman or Jerusalem or Athens or Washington. And his characters are acutely sensitive to the place and the moment. Aliyah, for example, arriving in Amman for the first time, “hadn’t expected all the hills, with their crowded, blocky architecture, everything rendered in watercolor shades of tan and off-white. Or so it seemed in the slanting light. The air had a strange smell, which stirred a vague familiarity. It was the dry, smoky character, she supposed, which took her back to distant times she hadn’t revisited in ages.”
But what especially lifts Fesperman’s thriller above the confines of its genre is the author’s empathy for those caught in the crossfire of the world’s conflicts. That he makes his narrator-protagonist a former UN aid worker, a would-be neutral, is no random choice. The operative irony of the novel is that Freeman (whose name is only a couple of consonants and a little anagramming away from “Fesperman”) wants to be a free man – one without a country -- because he has seen what harm can be done by the zeal of patriots and ideologues. But when he arrives in Amman – “a city of loose talk and stealthy listeners” -- he is instantly reminded how difficult the neutral pose can be. When he orders a Coke, the waiter tells him, with “a remark that from him sounded like an admonition,” that the restaurant serves only Pepsi. And then Freeman remembers an old rumor in the Arab world that the Coca-Cola logo said “No Mohammad, No Mecca” if you turned it backward. “I had forgotten what it was like working in a place where even your most innocent choice might be held against you.”
Worse things than a waiter’s scorn happen to Freeman and Aliyah and others in the novel, but the author’s alertness to such smaller tensions makes “The Amateur Spy” come alive. Fesperman has mastered his genre, but he often breaks out of its confines. You can sense him trying to move away from Tom Clancy and John Grisham and toward writers like Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, writers with a nuanced and ambivalent vision of the world and its conflicts. (Aliyah’s plight is reminiscent of that of Winnie Verloc, the anarchist’s wife in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” although Aliyah shrugs off the passivity in which Winnie was trapped.)
Throughout the novel, Fesperman reminds us that the world is a lot more complicated than the TV pundits, politicians and lockstep superpatriots would have us believe. Sometimes he does it with sly wit, as when Freeman hears a group in a hotel bar celebrating their release from the daytime fast of Ramadan: “The revelers began clapping to the beat, drowning out the muezzin, and the band broke into the disco standby ‘I Will Survive.’ Interesting to think of it as some sort of Palestinian anthem.”
And more than once he reminds us of the world’s pain, as when Aliyah reflects that she can’t tell her friend Nancy “that sometimes it gave her comfort to see news footage of American mothers grieving for their lost soldier boys, killed in Iraq. It wasn’t that she took pleasure in the deaths. It was that she thought her country needed this kind of sorrow to keep it humble, because that was how it worked in the rest of the world.”
November 27, 2017
I like that the author seemed very well versed in the Middle East and also in how NGOs operate in harsh, unforgiving areas.
My appreciation for all the hardships that aid workers endure has gone up a great deal if everything in the book is depicted accurately (it seems that it was).
I would give this book and author a try, I don't think you'll be disappointed in the writing or the subject matter.
My appreciation for all the hardships that aid workers endure has gone up a great deal if everything in the book is depicted accurately (it seems that it was).
I would give this book and author a try, I don't think you'll be disappointed in the writing or the subject matter.
August 7, 2018
‘The Amateur Spy’ was a bit of a disappointment, mainly because I couldn’t get past a couple situations that didn’t pass the smell test for me. I’ll get to those in a minute.
Dan Fesperman’s novel begins with a married couple of ex-NGO aid workers retired to a little house on a Greek island. They’re surprised by 3 CIA types who use some of the man’s past history to force him to undertake a spying mission for them in Jordan. The target is a former co-worker running a charity who is now suspected to be supporting terrorists. The man accepts a position in his friend’s organization and begins snooping around. A parallel plot involves an Arab-American doctor with a grudge who is planning a terrorist attack on American government officials. The plots converge at the end, with both being resolved in unexpected ways.
So, Fesperman can write and his dialogue is ok, meaning the problems I had weren’t related to his prose as much as with unrealistic situations. In my opinion, there were many, but the 2 that bothered me the most were related to the initial ‘kidnapping’ and the ongoing spying on the man’s employer. Initially, ‘turning’ the man was just too easy and the convergence of factors that led to it was very unlikely (his suspected terrorist just happens to have a job opening, the man and his wife live on a secluded island, a house owned by a ‘friend’ of the CIA-types happened to be vacant and available for their use during the abduction). The other thing that really bugged me was the fact that the man was able to flit around various Middle Eastern countries and cities asking extremely sensitive questions about his hyper-connected employer without his finding out about it. Again, there were other things that bothered me but those were the main ones.
All-in-all, a decent thriller that taught me a lot about NGO operations and Middle Eastern relationships.
Dan Fesperman’s novel begins with a married couple of ex-NGO aid workers retired to a little house on a Greek island. They’re surprised by 3 CIA types who use some of the man’s past history to force him to undertake a spying mission for them in Jordan. The target is a former co-worker running a charity who is now suspected to be supporting terrorists. The man accepts a position in his friend’s organization and begins snooping around. A parallel plot involves an Arab-American doctor with a grudge who is planning a terrorist attack on American government officials. The plots converge at the end, with both being resolved in unexpected ways.
So, Fesperman can write and his dialogue is ok, meaning the problems I had weren’t related to his prose as much as with unrealistic situations. In my opinion, there were many, but the 2 that bothered me the most were related to the initial ‘kidnapping’ and the ongoing spying on the man’s employer. Initially, ‘turning’ the man was just too easy and the convergence of factors that led to it was very unlikely (his suspected terrorist just happens to have a job opening, the man and his wife live on a secluded island, a house owned by a ‘friend’ of the CIA-types happened to be vacant and available for their use during the abduction). The other thing that really bugged me was the fact that the man was able to flit around various Middle Eastern countries and cities asking extremely sensitive questions about his hyper-connected employer without his finding out about it. Again, there were other things that bothered me but those were the main ones.
All-in-all, a decent thriller that taught me a lot about NGO operations and Middle Eastern relationships.
January 23, 2013
At various points throughout this book I kept wondering whether the narrator, Freeman Lockhart, was indeed what he said he was - an amateur spy. Even now I still wonder to what extent he was telling the truth. So a lot of questions raised, and many not answered. But a fun read, nevertheless.
November 1, 2016
The first four books by this author were wonderful, so my expectations coming into this one were quite high. Within the first few pages, however, I felt that something wasn't quite right. It seemed as though Fesperman strayed away from what made his first books so entertaining: a cerebral plot that increases in complexity and rich descriptions of life in faraway places. What I found instead was pages of backstory and a long wait to find out what was worth all of the risk for Freeman. Things improved once the action moved to Jordan, and the fact that I happened to be in Jordan at the time made the descriptions and details seem even more relevant.
When the blackmail event did arrive, it didn't seem all that earth-shattering. And since Mila was portrayed as quite a strong character who had seen the worst the world had to offer, I didn't believe that it was worth it for Freeman to take the risks he did in order to stop the truth from coming out.
Overall, the writing and research were great, as always, but there was too much backstory, the plot took too long to get going, and the characters' motivations seemed contrived at times.
When the blackmail event did arrive, it didn't seem all that earth-shattering. And since Mila was portrayed as quite a strong character who had seen the worst the world had to offer, I didn't believe that it was worth it for Freeman to take the risks he did in order to stop the truth from coming out.
Overall, the writing and research were great, as always, but there was too much backstory, the plot took too long to get going, and the characters' motivations seemed contrived at times.
June 22, 2017
This is not my usual genre but I am making an effort to read books set in different countries around the world. This was the one I selected for Jordan, I have already read Lawrence of Arabia.
This is a good story with believable and interesting characters. There are two stories one set in the USA with a doctor and his wife and a second set in Greece then Jordan taking in other countries along the way as the main character \freeman remembers his past work in different places as an Aid worker.
It is pretty topical too with all the tension in the Middle East and I found myself pretty much gripped from the start.
I liked how Freeman was not an expert and did make mistakes as that made him more human for
me.
I would be happy to read more of his books having read this one.
This is a good story with believable and interesting characters. There are two stories one set in the USA with a doctor and his wife and a second set in Greece then Jordan taking in other countries along the way as the main character \freeman remembers his past work in different places as an Aid worker.
It is pretty topical too with all the tension in the Middle East and I found myself pretty much gripped from the start.
I liked how Freeman was not an expert and did make mistakes as that made him more human for
me.
I would be happy to read more of his books having read this one.
July 26, 2017
You do have to pay attention while reading this book or you lose who's who. But it is an interesting spy thriller set in the Middle East, that part of the world that is always in the news, and involves someone who has become angry because of mistreatment of his family because of discrimination based on their last name - a Palestinian name - even though they are American citizens. This truly goes on, and we must be more aware of how it affects everyone involved. We must not judge people based on such criteria.
December 14, 2016
Interesting to read a spy novel published in 2007, how dated the world situation it portrays is. It takes place in the Middle East, but no ISIS, no Syrian war, no millions of refugees (only Palestinian refugees).
Also the main protagonist is a rather naive amateur (see the title) -- I find I much prefer the ones where the lead character actually has some expertise rather than bumbling around making things worse.
Also the main protagonist is a rather naive amateur (see the title) -- I find I much prefer the ones where the lead character actually has some expertise rather than bumbling around making things worse.
May 5, 2020
3/5. Freeman Lockhart never signed up to be a spy, but a little coercion goes a long way, sending the retired aid worker off to Jordan to join an old aid buddy's NGO. This solid, well-researched tale helps us understand the Bakaa Refuge Camp, the Palestinians' struggle to reclaim their homeland and how fanaticism can consume even those who, to all outward appearances, have successfully assimilated into Western culture.
June 27, 2018
From a somewhat hesitant start, this thriller continues to build into a super-charged tale of espionage, both amateur and professional, involving three nations. Additionally, it puts one in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict in refugee camps and in Amman and Jerusalem around 2009 - without taking sides.
May 4, 2020
An action packed story. FBI, Mossad, Mukhabarat, they are all there in Jordan competing with each other. F. Lockhart, an american, is forced to work for one of them, but which one? Excellent story.
June 17, 2025
Dan Fesperman is one of my favorite authors. This book is another excellent book of his. The story is very interesting. I learned about the printing and also what’s involved something that’s involved in and printing currency illegally. It’s a good book enjoy.
October 17, 2018
een van de weinige boeken die ik niet heb uitgelezen. Ik kon er echt geen touw aan vastknopen. Waar het verhaal heen wilde, ik weet het niet. Iets over de helft heb ik het opgegeven
December 29, 2018
A readable 'thriller' about yet another Muslim attack against the USA. A slightly different twist to the plot and well-enough written to be worth the time to read.
June 30, 2020
Easy read, but I forced myself to complete it. It was not really compelling. Would not recommend it.
August 6, 2020
Read to page 200 then skipped to the final 100 pages and I did not miss a thing!!! The plot lacked authenticity.
September 20, 2020
Too long, too complicated, not a worthy plot
October 7, 2021
Not as good as some of his later books. Characters were blah. Plot was ok
November 25, 2022
Solid write. Interesting spin on "Blue Helmets" work and how that can unwillingly transition into "spying." Good plot, pulls it all together in last 50 pages.
February 23, 2014
I almost didn't get past page 70 with this book. It started out with everything I can't stand to read or hear about....the UN and its "humanitarian" work, the poor downtrodden "palestinians", and.....well, you get the point. It is so well written, however, that I couldn't help but be drawn into the story, even though I never could stand any of the characters in the book. I did love one quote in particular on page 285: "In Jerusalem, belief as a form of aggression achieved near perfection. Whether you went deep in the earth or climbed the highest hill, someone's faith would track you down, catch you in its sights, and demand that you choose sides." Wonderfully written book, no matter how you feel about the plot or the characters!
April 5, 2008
Fesperman's novels have always been intricately plotted with lots of local color and clearly well researched venues all over the world. This book is disappointing. While the local color is still there, this time Amman, Jerusalem, and Greece, the plot is truly absurd and leaves many loose ends. The characters, unlike previous novels, are not believable, especially the moody surgeon Abbas and the enigmatic Omar. Very little makes sense and although you are carried along by the narrative for many pages, you are left wondering how could such a good author write such a preposterous story.
March 25, 2011
Freeman Lockhart, retired aid worker, moves to a remote Greek island with his wife, only to be blackmailed into spying on an old friend in Jordan. Lockhart travels to Amman and fumbles his way through an adventure complete with lies, threats, and bombs. Like most of Fesperman's adventures, this story is easy to read and entertaining. While Fesperman expertly describes the political and physical reality in the Middle East, the plot is flawed. Characters operate under unclear motivation and threats disappear without explanation. This is not Fesperman's best work.
April 7, 2008
Could have been much better. I guess it works well enough for a spy story, but if you know anything about the middle east you get frustrated with the depictions of Jordan and the Palestinian issue. Plus, I found it a bit offensive that their were two main protaginists, but the story of the white american was told in first person, while the arab-american woman was told in third.
June 22, 2010
Good tale of a professor-type being blackmailed into going to the Middle East to get information on some shadow terrorist group. He has been a UN aid worker and observer, and has 'friends' in the area. Even though he knows the language and some of the people, he has no idea what is actually happening. I liked it.
December 26, 2008
I have read 3 of Dan's books recently because I got caught up in his ability to spin a tale about current events that have left us with so many unanswered questions and concerns. This was my second on my list of favorites written by him, The Prisoner of Guantamo being my favorite.
July 9, 2012
This is one of those books I wish I could choose 2 1/2. It took me a long time to read this book. It moved vry slowly. I just finished it, and I have to say I am not completely satisfied with it. It is well written, and I am curious about his other books, but I guess I'm a little confused by it.
Want to read
September 11, 2007Pick by Mark from The Economist - got good review. Should be out in US soon.
June 29, 2008
That you can never trust those development professionals are telling the truth about who they are!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews