A Seattle Times Best Mystery of the Year

A Times of London Best Crime/Thriller Book of the Year

A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, spook-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster reveals to up-and-coming journalist Bill Cage that he’d once considered spying for the enemy. For Cage, a fan who grew up as a Foreign Service brat in the very cities where Lemaster set his plots, the story creates a brief but embarrassing sensation. More than two decades later, Cage receives an anonymous note hinting that he should have dug deeper. Spiked with cryptic references to some of his and his father’s favorite old spy novels, the note is the first piece of a puzzle that will lead Cage back to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in search of the truth, even as he discovers that the ghosts of Lemaster’s past eerily—and dangerously—still haunt the present. As the suspense steadily increases, decades of secrets begin to unravel.

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. 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