Fesperman, Dan. Lie in the Dark. New York: Soho Press, 1999.
I can remember this intense sadness when the civil war in Sarajevo broke out…the second time. It seemed like yesterday the Olympics were held there & it was a city of promise, of dreams come true.
Lie in the Dark is an interesting tale about life in war-torn Sarajevo and one police inspector’s fight to win his own private war. In the beginning of the conflict Vlado Petrics’s wife and infant daughter were allowed to escape to Germany. Vlado, as with all men of military serving age, stayed behind. He escaped being drafted into the military because of his employment as a policeman.
While investigating a murder Vlado is confronted with a much bigger scandal than he bargained for. Not knowing who to trust he works alone, unraveling the mystery while the civil war continues all around him. Woven into the plot are the harsh realities of what war can do to economics, politics, families, the landscape and the human spirit.
Right away I knew I would like this book. Fesperman does a great job describing the absurdity of investigating a murder in the middle of a war. As Fesperman says (p 2) “Vlado’s task was that of a plumber fixing leaky toilets in the middle of a flood.” It makes you realize that people will grasp and struggle for normalcy even if it doesn’t make sense.
Favorite lines: ” They never stopped retreating, ending up at the bottom of either a bottle or a grave” (p 5).
I found this next line profoundly sad: “It had taken the first few weeks of separation to rediscover her as lover, as something more than the wife and mother she’d become” (p 83).
“He felt himself beginning to deaden, to go numb and cold and dreary as he left the truth behind” (p 86).
BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter “Crime is a Globetrotter” (p 59).
~*LunaSea*~ 