Investigator Petric makes his living from the dead, what with the siege around Sarajevo. Lately business has been slow. Condoned killing has displaced the crime of passion. His services with the civil police as a homicide investigator have been less in demand. One premeditated death does call for inquiry. It is no abused lover or distant sniper's victim but a government official shot dead at close range-the chief of the Interior Ministry's special police.
In a thriller that recalls the dark excitement of Vienna in Graham Greene's The Third Man, author Dan Fesperman brilliantly renders the fragmented society and underworld of Sarajevo at war-the freelancing gangsters, guilty bystanders, drop-in correspondents, the bureaucrats frightened for their jobs and for their very lives -and weaves through this torn cityscape one man's desperate, deadly pursuit of the wrong people in the wrongest place.