The Double Game (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

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. Okay, 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, and 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.” Innovative and evocative. --Neal Thompson