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Sam Keller may be only twenty-eight, but he is a second-generation accountant and an MBA from Chicago, so he is not prone to risk-taking. Still, when the quite terrifying, if alluring, Nanette Weaver, executive vice-president for corporate security of Sam's pharmaceutical firm tasks him with keeping an eye on a raffish colleague while on a brief trip to Dubai, he is not unwilling to take a walk on the wilder side of corporate entertainment. Predictably, as happens with great regularity when a naïf wanders away from his usual path, Sam is very quickly in over his head. While he waiting for his charge, Charlie Hatcher, to emerge from a private room in a dubious Dubai club, he cannot help feeling that the advertised pleasures of the flesh are in this instance highly over-rated and he keeps his hand firmly on his wallet. Minutes later, Charlie is discovered shot and in fairly short order, Sam is under suspicion of the murder, though he clearly was nowhere near the scene of the crime. He succeeds in evading arrest though the intervention of a remarkably honest senior police inspector, Anwar Sharaf, a reader of Dostoevsky in the original Russian, and his daughter, Laleh, herself a successful businesswoman, despite her youth and the handicaps placed in the way of women in the Emirate. What ensues, as the narrative follows each of these characters separately, is a fascinating view of the contradictions of a country that depends on an openness to the world for its healthy economy but that retains the customs, beliefs, and loyalties that were current long before oil was discovered or the first tower block built. Fesperman is especially concerned with the situation of women in the Emirate, which he explores with some sensitivity both in his treatment of Sharaf's marriage and especially though the character of Laleh, successful, highly educated, and naturally feeling the strain of having to conform to the demands of a traditional definition of decorous womanhood. Her father is at once deeply proud of her and wholly terrified that she will do something to bring disgrace upon him. It has to be said that Fesperman has never, to my mind, equalled the achievement of his first two thrillers, LIE IN THE DARK and THE SMALL BOAT OF GREAT SORROWS. These, set against the background of the former Yugoslavia, informed by the tragedy that is Balkan history, engaged the reader in a deeper sort of way than any of the excellent novels that followed after. In his latest, Fesperman indicates once again that he has not lost his descriptive touch, his ability to drive through to the heart of the matter that interests him, nor his talent for plotting. This may not be the masterpiece that the earlier novels were, but it's still awfully good and well worth your time. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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