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The Double Game (2012)

by Dan Fesperman(Favorite Author)

3.34 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0307700135 (ISBN13: 9780307700131)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Knopf

review 1: Intriguing book starring a man whose widowed father worked at various embassies. As a boy, he would do odd jobs for his father taking various packages to nearby bookstores. Now, he himself is divorced and working a deadend job in an ad agency. The game starts when he receives various cutouts from pages of old spy novels, hinting at his father's (and his own) role(s) in the great game. On the surface, he then undertakes a mysterious hunt for information about these events decades ago, but actually, the book is an homage to spy novels of this century. Fesperman even provides a appendix that is a bibliography of "222 books,by 48 authors, 18 of whom worked in intelligence (their names are in boldface), 6 more of whom worked in foreign ministries or a war/defense office." Not h... moreaving more than a passing knowledge of spy novels, I got a bit tired of the references on every page to books I had not read, but I could see that, for a person who loves spy novels, this would be an amazing find.
review 2: A lifelong fan of spy novels is led through Europe by a series of clues pulled right from the pages of his favorite books in Dan Fesperman's THE DOUBLE GAME. If someone left you a riddle written on a page torn from your favorite book, would you drop everything and jet off to Europe? If your answer is a chuckle and a 'No,' then you probably won't make it past the first 50 pages of THE DOUBLE GAME. I applaud the author's intent, but the result is a contrived, laughable exercise that seems to posit the greatest spies of the Cold War were really book nerds who routinely spent thousands on first editions and memorized whole passages. And if that wasn't enough, the sheer volume of characters and red herrings Fesperman tries to insinuate into his plot left me more and more lost each time I picked up the book -- and I read it in less than a week. If you'd like to spend your next read on a spy novel, I would recommend examining Fesperman's impressive timeline of spy literature in his Appendices and picking up any one work from that list instead of spending your valuable time on THE DOUBLE GAME. less

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