The Small Boat of Great Sorrows
A Novel
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The widely acclaimed author of Winter Work brings together chilling crimes, the lies people live and the cold facts of international politics into a “deft and gripping [thriller]. Impeccably written and ably plotted.… The action is more or less nonstop.” (The New York Times Books Review).
Vlado Petric, a former homicide detective in Sarajevo, is now living in exile, and making a meagre living working at a Berlin construction site, when an American investigator for the International War Crimes Tribunal recruits him to return home on a mission. The assignment sounds simple enough. He is to help capture an aging Nazi collaborator who has become a war profiteer. But nothing is simple in the Balkans: Petric is also being used as bait to lure his quarry into the open, and when the operation goes sour he is drawn across Europe into a dangerous labyrinth of secret identities, stolen gold, and horrifying discoveries about his own family’s past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The past isn't dead, it isn't even past," said William Faulkner about the American South. That goes double for the former Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1998, at the start of this chilling, accomplished espionage novel, the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague decides to pick up a wanted Serbian general, Andric. As a quid pro quo, the French want Pero Matek, a Croatian war criminal from WWII, lifted from Bosnia, where he has become a minor capo. Calvin Pine, from the tribunal, travels to Berlin to contact Vlado Petric, a Bosnian migr and former Sarajevo detective. Taking leave of his wife and daughter, Vlado is debriefed at The Hague, then sent with Pine to post-conflict Sarajevo. Vlado has a secret: some acquaintances of his in Berlin had recently murdered a Serbian war criminal, Popovic, and Vlado helped them dispose of the corpse. At the tribunal, a sinister American named Harkness has been referring enigmatically to Popovic's "disappearance." In Sarajevo, Pine reveals the real reason Vlado was chosen to set up Matek-unbeknownst to Vlado, his late father was an associate of Matek's during WWII. The setup fails; Matek escapes. Following Matek to Italy, Vlado and Pine rendezvous with a former American army intelligence agent, Robert Fordham, who is edgily paranoid. Fordham claims there's a deep connection between the Croats and American intelligence. Just how deep becomes clear as the pair close in on Matek. This tight, intelligent thriller by the author of the well-received Lie in the Dark chillingly describes a world in which justice is always a negotiation between highly compromised alternatives, and history burdens every player-except for the executioners.
