Review by Booklist Review
The term mean streets takes on an additional shade of meaning in this riveting first novel. Vlado Petric is a homicide investigator in besieged Sarajevo, and walking any street means listening for incoming artillery and intuitively gauging snipers' lines of fire. In the chaos of war, the Bosnian Ministry of the Interior has formed a special police force that has taken over the high-profile cases. Vlado's department is left with the dregs--domestic violence fueled by madness, stress, or alcohol. But when the chief of the special police is killed and snitches hint at his involvement in the black market, Vlado is given the investigation to help convince the UN that the Bosnian government is committed to truth and justice. This is a thoroughly satisfying cop novel. What makes it special, however, is its vivid sense of place. Fesperman, a journalist who has covered the confused conflicts that are shattering Yugoslavia, gives readers the tastes, smells, sounds, and privations of everyday life and an understanding of the roots of an appallingly muddled and tragic war. --Thomas Gaughan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Having dug into Yugoslavia's recent past for what undoubtedly was meant to be a taut whodunit, journalist and first novelist Fesperman has come up with something that reads more like a report from the battlefield than a novel. The story, unfolding against a backdrop of war-ravaged Sarajevo, concerns itself with a police homicide investigator's efforts to solve the murder of the chief of the interior ministry's special police. Fesperman describes a world of terror and disintegrating civilization; treachery, corruption, shake-downs, sniper attacks, shelling, and a staggering accumulation of daily atrocities darken every page. Unfortunately, fiction seems secondary to what can only be described as a brilliant piece of war reportageÄFesperman was a European correspondent for the Baltimore Evening Sun during the war in Yugoslavia. One is left with the impression that he is using his negligible plot merely as a line on which to hang powerful and descriptive word pictures. Recommended only if another mystery is needed.ÄA.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What's one more casualty in war-torn Sarajevo? Big trouble for a homicide investigator struggling to keep his balance on the Bosnian tightrope--in this darkly suspenseful first novel. Though life isn't exactly good for Detective Inspector Vlado Petrie, he's accommodated himself to the rhythms of life in the combat zone, illegally packing his wife and infant daughter off to Berlin, rising each morning with the gravediggers outside his window, living from one pack of cigarettes and precious can of black-market coffee to the next. But all that changes when Esmir Vitas, chief of the Interior Ministry's special police, is shot dead. His successor Juso Kasic, the acting chief who blithely admits he had every reason to kill Vitas himself, asks Vlado to head the investigation. Given homicide's strained resources, that means virtually becoming the whole investigation. So Vlado, without gasoline or a working car, sets off on his legwork, picking his way among ruined streets and bombed-out buildings. Armed with a list of Vitas's undercover contacts, he has no trouble unearthing Vitas's crude attempts to muscle in on the illegal trade in tobacco and meat. But when none of these fiddles seems to justify Vitas's murder (and this in a city that holds life cheap), Vlado presses on, and links Vitas to a complicated scheme to liberate works of art--to protect them till the end of the war, really, he's told--that amounts to a wholesale sacking of Bosnia's cultural treasures. Unfortunately, the closer to the truth about Vitas's death Vlado comes, the closer he also comes to bothering a lot of important mobsters, generals, and, yes, Interior Ministers who very much don't want to be bothered. Gorky Park in Sarajevo. Though Fesperman's take on civil crime in a country at war won't seem especially original to fans of Graham Greene or John le Carr‚--or, for that matter, of Philip Kerr or J. Robert Janes--his portrait of shattered Bosnia can stand with their bleakest work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
