Safe Houses, Paperback

A gripping new work of suspense about Cold War-era Berlin and a decades-long cover-up that has lethal consequences.

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amid the dangerous milieu of a city in the grip of the Cold Warl. Helen's world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two agents speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her firmly in the sights of one of the most ruthless and powerful men at the agency. With the help of two female colleagues, Helen goes on the run. Her attempts to expose the truth about what she has seen will create repurcussions that reach across decades and continents into the present day, when, in a farm town in Maryland, two people are gruesomely murdered. Now Helen's daughter, Anna, aided by a jaded Washington fixer, must chase down what is buried in her mother's past and face the chilling fact that old secrets never die.

About the Author:

DAN FESPERMAN's travels as a journalist and novelist 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 Guant namo won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers. He lives in Baltimore.