Investigator Petric makes his living from the dead. Lately business has been slow, what with the siege around Sarajevo. Condoned killing has displaced the crime of passion; his services with the civil police as a homicide investigator have been less in dem&. Unluckily one premeditated death does land on the detective's desk. It is no abused lover or a distant sniper's victim but a government official
- the chief of the interior ministry's police
- shot dead at close range. In a thriller that recalls the first excitement of Martin Cruz Smith's Moscow & the Vienna of Graham Greene's The Third Man, author Dan Fesperman brilliantly renders the fragmented society & underworld of Sarajevo at war
- the freelancing gangsters, guilty bystanders, drop-in correspondents, the bureaucrats frightened for their jobs & very lives
- & he weaves through this torn cityscape one man's desperate, deadly pursuit of the wrong people in the worst places.