Sins of the fathers

Dan Fesperman’s first book, Lie in the Dark, was a fine debut: set in Sarajevo during the civil war, it had homicide detective Vlado Petric struggling to investigate a murder case while sniper bullets snapped about his heels. The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (Bantam Press, £12.99) is the follow-up and it is written to the same high standard. Petric is building a new life with his wife and daughter in Berlin when an American working for the International War Crimes Tribunal approaches him with a job offer: go back to Bosnia and help us to flush out a war criminal. The twist is that the men from the Hague are hunting a genocidist from an earlier generation, an Ustashi concentration camp guard during the second world war; the double twist is that, to Petric’s dismay, his own father turns out to have been the target’s accomplice. Fesperman spins out the ensuing developments into a well-paced tale of deceit, manipulation and double-crossing, and in Petric creates a complex protagonist, idealistic but pragmatic, sensitive but resilient.