The Small Boat of Great Sorrows — Dan Fesperman

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.