Layover in Dubai

May 31, 2010
Set in Dubai, Fesperman's listless, dialogue-heavy thriller concerns an American businessman, Sam Keller, who gets tangled up in competing criminal interests following the murder of a colleague. An auditor for a giant pharmaceutical company, Sam spends most of his time on the run, trying to avoid capture by either corrupt cops, Russian mobsters, or officials from his own company who have their own reasons for wanting him to fall off the radar. Sam is aided by possibly the one honest cop in Dubai, Anwar Sharaf, who quickly finds himself fleeing Sam's enemies, too. Fesperman (The Arms Maker of Berlin) does an admirable job of describing life in Dubai, a capitalistic freefor-all deeply troubled by the conflict between Western culture and religious tradition, but the plot falters early and quickly peters out. Anwar's cultural ambivalence and passion for justice provide spark, but Sam's wide-eyed, plain vanilla sensibility snuffs it out.

June 1, 2010

The cultural dynamic of Dubai provides the most compelling element in this international thriller.

A former foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, award-winning crime novelist Fesperman (The Arms Maker of Berlin, 2009, etc.) finds intrigue in yet another exotic locale, though the one-dimensional characters offer no match for the ambiguities of the setting, a city steeped in tradition yet growing at an astounding pace that results in cultural whiplash. It is an "eerie insta-city...(where) everything between the desert and the deep blue sea was for sale, and all of it was either going fast or being paved over to make way for more." Observes protagonist Sam Keller, a young auditor for a huge pharmaceutical company, "This was how the Emerald City must have looked after the Wizard flew off in his balloon, taking all the rules with him." Sam's work includes a lot of travel, though he is surprised when his superiors ask him to meet with an older, more reckless colleague in Dubai for what appears to be babysitting detail. Sam accompanies the colleague to a brothel, where a murder generates suspicion that Sam might be implicated. But the reader recognizes early on that characters in this novel are either good or bad and that Sam is one of the good guys, though it can be a challenge for him to distinguish the other good guys from the bad guys. He finds himself caught between two rival police officers and has to decide which one is more likely to help him and which is more interested in framing him. His home corporation that initially promised to help protect him inexplicably appears to be turning on him. He receives support from an obligatory love interest, who is plainly good, though her father fears that her increasingly Westernized values are bad. As the plot thickens, Sam finds himself "sought by the police, your employers, your embassy, and the criminal elite of two nations."

A guy with "the soul of a bohemian caged by the mind of an auditor" finds more excitement on the job than he'd ever anticipated.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 15, 2010

Sam Keller, an auditor for pharmaceutical giant Pfluger Klaxon, has extended his layover in Dubai to keep an eye on coworker Charlie Hatcher at the behest of the corporate security chief, Nanette Weaver. When Charlie disappears in a club with a Slavic prostitute, Sam is forced to search for him, only to find Hatcher shot to death in a back office. Weaver turns against him, as does the police lieutenant investigating Hatcher's murder. To escape them and their Russian and Iranian mob allies, Keller must put his trust in unassuming police officer Anwar Sharaf, his family, and Sharaf's connections. The cat-and-mouse game moves from glitzy malls to jails, labor camps, and beyond, as they discover a vast human trafficking ring behind Hatcher's murder. To complicate matters further, Keller is drawn to Sharaf's daughter Lelah, who is far from a traditional Emirati woman. VERDICT Fesperman (The Prisoner of Guantanamo) gives readers a great, suspenseful ride and believable characters in the vibrant boom town of Dubai. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10.]--Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Lib., Wisconsin Rapids

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2010
Sam Keller, an auditor for pharmaceutical giant Pfluger Klaxon, is in Dubai, traveling with a colleague who has a reputation for indulging himself on the road. Indeed, St. Sam has been charged by Nanette Weaver, VP for corporate security, with shadowing his partner and reporting back to her. So, when the partner is murdered in a Dubai brothel, Sam knows he has a problem, but he doesnt have any idea how big. Hes soon targeted by crooked cops, Russian mobsters, a bent diplomat, and some corporate sharks; his best hope is Anwar Sharaf, a frumpy Dubai police lieutenant who is distracted by his emirates headlong leap into slapdash modernity and by his strong-willed, liberated daughter, Laleh. Sam, Anwar, and Laleh are pleasingly conflicted characters ill-prepared for derring-do, but Fesperman makes Dubai his books finest character. Fabulous wealth and opulence grind like tectonic plates against traditional Muslim culture, foreign workers outnumber emiratis by nine to one, and rival clans still plot against each other. Layover in Dubai has plenty of action, but its Fespermans portrait of a truly bizarre place that will captivate readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)