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Novel set at Gitmo first-class thriller

Mary J. Elkins, Special to the News

Published August 4, 2006 at midnight

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Could there be any more timely (or tricky) setting for a thriller these days than Guantanamo?

This piece of American property on Cuban soil enjoys instant name recognition and just as instant controversy. It's an ideal setting for Dan Fesperman, an international correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and the author of three previous novels set in dangerous places, notably Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.

In his terrific latest offering, we meet Revere Falk, a former U.S. Marine, now employed as an FBI agent and assigned (largely because he speaks Arabic) as an interrogator at Gitmo, as the prison is known. As the novel begins, he's asked to investigate a suspicious drowning of a soldier at the camp. Soon enough, he's prying too deeply and is pushed off the case.

While a valuable tool, his knowledge of Arabic - as well as his civilian status - makes other Americans there distrust him, and he finds himself being recast as a traitor and set up to take a fall - although he's not sure for what. As an added complication, like any thriller hero worth his salt, he has a secret in his past that he wants to keep concealed and that makes him vulnerable to those who already know it.

The Prisoner of Guantanamo has all the right elements: The plot hangs together and keeps the reader in suspense; the characters are complex and credible; the style is polished and professional. There isn't one clunker of a sentence in the book. And Fesperman has a gift for atmosphere. Both the scenes at Gitmo and in Cuban Miami are wonderfully rendered. The final strength of the novel is an underlying intelligence.

This is a political novel as well as a thriller, and Fesperman is interested in ideas. Asked in an interview why he likes to use current events as subject matter and why he has focused this time on Guantanamo, he responds, "I've always been fascinated by the way events in the here and now echo so much of what has gone on before."

Citing the timelessness of each crisis, he continues, "Guantanamo, to me at least, represents yet another period in our history when we've let hubris and insecurity push us to the limits of what is considered 'American behavior.' "

This isn't the first time that we've gotten mad and ignored the rules, Fesperman indicates. But such politics shape and move the plot and characters, rather than overwhelm them. Fesperman doesn't grab us by the collar and preach. Instead, he draws us into his readable, hard-to-put-down story, delivering a first-class thriller.



Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins.