A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster revealed to up-and-coming journalist Bill Cage that he’d once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, a Foreign Service brat who grew up in the very cities where Lemaster’s books were set, the news story created a brief but embarrassing sensation and heralded the beginning of the end of his career in journalism.
More than two decades later, Cage, now a lonely, disillusioned PR man, receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper into Lemaster’s pronouncement. Spiked with cryptic references to some of Cage’s favorite spy novels, the note is the first of many literary bread crumbs that lead him back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, each instruction drawing him closer to the complex truth, each giving rise to more questions: Why is beautiful Litzi Strauss back in his life after thirty years? How much of his father’s job involved the CIA? As the events of Lemaster’s past eerily—and dangerously—begin intersecting with those of Cage’s own, a “long stalemate of secrecy” may finally be coming to an end.
A story about spies and their secrets, fathers and sons, lovers and fate, duplicity and loyalty, The Double Game ingeniously taps the espionage classics of the Cold War to build a spellbinding maze of intrigue. It is Dan Fesperman’s most audacious, suspenseful, and satisfying novel yet.
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: The Double Game begins as a playful spy caper within a spy caper, in which clues to a mystery are found in the pages and plots of old spy novels. OK, clever enough. But the story quickly becomes more refreshingly and unexpectedly mysterious with each turn of the page, and I realized that Fesperman has achieved something remarkable here: He's turned the spy novel on its head while paying homage to the genre, at the same time giving us an unlikely protagonist who discovers that he's lived his entire life in a world “where fact and fiction were virtually indistinguishable.” --Neal Thompson
From Booklist
Starred Review In the mid-1980s, journalist Bill Cage inadvertently reveals a startling secret about best-selling spy turned novelist Edwin Lemaster. Many years later, Cage—now a former journalist, his own career, like Lemaster’s, never having recovered from that incident—is lured into a web of intrigue by a nameless individual who hints that, with his Lemaster revelation, Cage had only scratched the surface. What’s especially clever here is the way Cage’s anonymous “handler” (for Cage soon thinks of himself as a spy being run by an unknown operator) uses works of spy fiction to communicate—encoded messages rely on Cage’s virtually encyclopedic knowledge of spy fiction, and shadowy characters who wander in and out of the story bear physical resemblance to characters in spy novels (and, of course, Lemaster himself, the focal point of the intrigue, is a hugely popular spy novelist, a sort of American le Carré). At once a celebration of some of the genre’s best authors and a smartly constructed and thoroughly modern spy story, this is a surefire hit and a must for anyone who reveres the espionage masters. --David Pitt