Nancy McKibben's Reviews > The Double Game

The Double Game
By Dan Fesperman

For anyone who loves spy novels, this book is too much fun. As a young journalist, Bill Cage, who grew up in Cold War Europe under the tutelage of his father, embarrasses the colleague of his father in a published interview. As a result, Bill’s journalism career hits a wall and he reluctantly turns to PR to make a living.

Twenty years later, Bill begins receiving notes hinting that he should follow up on that embarrassing story - perhaps the family friend was, in fact, a spy. And so the quest begins, enlivened by the series of notes, which offer clues in the form of passages from classic spy novels. So Bill sets off to follow the trail across Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and eventually to Washington.

As in any spy novel, people are seldom who they seem. Who could possibly care about Cold War incidents that happened so long ago? Why does a childhood friend - now an alluring woman - suddenly reappear in Bill’s life? As Bill remembers his childhood, including mysterious errands engineered by his father, who was incidentally the collector of the very Cold War spy novels from which the clues have been taken, he begins to wonder - could his own father possibly have been a spy - or at least a person who cooperated with spies?

As in the best spy novels, the story is not in the action, but in the plot and counterplot, the double cross and the triple cross, the agent and the double agent. Will Bill get it right? What is he to believe about his father? About his grown son? Who is tricking whom - or is Bill just paranoid? And will Bill figure out everything in time to save himself and those he loves from impending danger?

Fesperman keeps the reader guessing nicely.