In Dan Fesperman’s highly praised Lie in the Dark (“A quite astonishing first novel”—Ian Rankin), we met Vlado Petric, a homicide detective in Sarajevo, a war-torn place where life itself had little worth. Now, five years later, Petric has escaped to join his wife and daughter in Berlin, and is scratching out a meager but stable existence at a construction site. So when he’s recruited by Calvin Pine—an enigmatic American investigator for the war crimes tribunal at The Hague—to join a search mission back in the ruins of his homeland, he finds it hard to resist. They’re seeking a general responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica, but Petric is also being offered as bait to lure another suspect whose activities in World War II make the current generation of killers look like amateurs. Getting hotter on a trail that eventually leads across Europe, Petric soon finds that great political powers make unsavory alliances, and that investigating the mysteries of the past can be as dangerous as navigating the war zones of the present.A gripping novel about legends and lies, about great deceptions and personal truths, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows is a galvanizing detective novel in a vein that brilliantly transcends the genre. Read Less