Product Description

Vlado Petric, former detective in war-torn Sarajevo, has left his beloved homeland to join his wife and daughter in Germany, where he scratches a meagre living among the dust of former conflicts on the building sites of the new Berlin. Returning home one evening, he finds an enigmatic American investigator waiting for him in the small apartment he now shares with his wife and daughter. The investigator, Calvin Pine, works for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he tells Petric that they want him to go to The Hague. It doesn't take Petric long to accept, especially when Pine tells him they are after a big fish: one of the men who they think is responsible for the terrible massacre of Srebrenica. What Petric doesn't know is that he is also being used as bait to lure into the open a murderer from the previous generation; a man whose activities in the Second World War makes the current generation of killers look like amateurs. As Petric travels from modern-day Germany, through the ruins of Bosnia, to the peaceful hills of southern Italy where bitter, unresolved tensions still crackle beneath the surface, the stakes become all too personal. And he soon finds that investigating the mysteries of the past can be every bit as dangerous as finding his way through the war zones of the present.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #273752 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
Vlado Petric, an ex-detective from Sarajevo, now lives in the newly reunited Berlin and works on construction sites. It's a life, but only just. And then he goes home one night to find Calvin Pine waiting for him. Pine is from the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and he wants Petric to go back to Sarajevo and help with a complex plan to effect the arrest of a Serb general implicated in the massacre at Srebenica. Petric agrees, even though he's fairly sure there's more going on than he's being allowed to know. The book has a plot as tortuous and snakelike as Balkan politics itself, and the feeling of unease, of constantly walking on shifting sands, never knowing who to trust, is palpable - a brilliant follow-up the John Creasey Dagger Award-winning Lie in the Dark.

Publishers Weekly
'This tight intelligent thriller chillingly describes a world in which justice is always a negotiation between highly compromised alternatives.'

From the Back Cover
WINNER OF THE CWA STEEL DAGGER FOR THRILLER OF THE YEAR

Vlado Petric, former detective in war-torn Sarajevo, has left his beloved homeland to join his wife and daughter in Germany, where he scratches a meagre living among the dust of former conflicts on the building sites of the new Berlin.

Returning home one evening, he finds an enigmatic American investigator waiting for him. Calvin Pine works for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he tells Petric that they want him to go to The Hague. It doesn't take Petric long to accept, especially when Pine tells him who they are after: one of the men who may be responsible for the terrible massacre of Srebrenica.

What Petric doesn't know is that he is also being used as bait for a murderer from the previous generation; a man whose activities in the Second World War make the current generation of killers look like amateurs.

As Petric travels from modern-day Germany, through the ruins of Bosnia, to the peaceful hills of southern Italy where bitter, unresolved tensions still crackle beneath the surface, the stakes become all too personal. And he soon finds that investigating the mysteries of the past can be every bit as dangerous as finding his way through the war zones of the present.

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Book
This is the first book I've read by this author and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The plot was interesting - an ex-policeman from Bosnia living in Berlin is recruited to help arrest an old Croatian accused of war crimes in WWII. Vlado Patric discovers there is more to the case than meets the eye. Somebody seems to be manipulating things behind the scenes but who and why? The story is well-written and holds the readers attention all the way through. The characters are interesting and intriguing in every sense of the word. I really enjoyed this book and will looking out for others by the same author.

Taut, Exciting and Different
I thoroughly enjoyed this pacey and exciting thriller/mystery. The genre is one that is full of clones and repeats, but The Small Boat of Great Sorrows combines strands of history I haven't come across before. The hero is a Bosnian ex-Police officer living as an exiled, poorly-paid manual labourer in Berlin. The surface of the book is consumed by that recent, bloody conflict, but the meat of the mystery harks back to the shards of the second world war. Fesperman skillfully weaves the plot so past and present collide driven by the selfish actions of individuals and institutions. Family relationships, professional rivalries and an almost Kafka-esque sense of the individual sucked powerless into greater events is all handled convincingly and the moral dimension is explored in an interesting way.

Overly Contrived Sequel
This sequel to Fesperman's excellent award-winning debut (Lie in the Dark) picks up Vlado Petric's story five years later, in 1998. We find the former Bosnian policeman in Berlin, where he was reunited with his wife and daughter, and has been working menial construction jobs. In a somewhat heavy-handed prologue, Vlado and his Polish construction mate unearth an old Nazi bunker while digging a trench. This serves notice to the reader that even as the foundation for a new Europe is being laid, the ugly past is always lurking just below the surface. Get it? In a more affecting early part of the story, we learn that Vlado's reuniting with his family (following the events of Lie in the Dark) was not quite the stuff of fairy tales. This ties in to a subplot in which he becomes entangled with a pair of fellow countrymen who swear to have seen a war criminal nearby. This leads him down an unlikely and unnecessary subplot, which links all too conveniently to the main story.

Things really gets going when an American lawyer working for the International War Crimes Tribunal offers Vlado a job as part of a team trying to capture a Croatian war criminal from World War II. This is all part of another unlikely and overly complicated scheme to swap him to the French if they arrest a Serbian war criminal from the more recent fighting. The carrot of a visit home and a possible job are dangled in front of him, and of course he accepts. The trip to Bosnia becomes wildly complicated and dangerous, unfortunately, the pitfalls are obvious to the reader well ahead of Vlado and his handler. The story continues in Rome, and veers into even more wild territory, as dark secrets from WWII hold the power to do significant harm even now. Fesperman's plotting draws upon various real events (the theft of gold from the Croatian treasury, the involvement of Catholic priests in helping war criminals gain new identities, etc.), but it rarely feels plausible.

Fesperman's strength lies in depicting modern Bosnia and the effects of the war upon its people. The book is at its most effective when focusing on Vlado and his family's life as refugees in Germany, or in showing Sarajevo recovering from the war. Unfortunately, most of the book deals in the past and ends up feeling like a Ken Follett or Robert Ludlum thriller. It's not bad, just not as distinctive as Lie in the Dark, but I'll definitely read the next installment in Vlado's story.