Safe Houses - Dan Fesperman

Dan Fesperman is not a new-to-me author. I have read three of his previous novels (Lie in the Dark, The Prisoner of Guantanamo, and The Amateur Spy), each of which I enjoyed because of their complicated plots and Fesperman’s writing style. But because I decided to go with the audiobook version of Safe Houses this time around, I learned something about Fesperman I probably would never have otherwise picked up on: if this man couldn’t write a lick, he could make one heck of a living narrating the audiobooks of other writers. He is so good a narrator that I had to double-check to make sure that it was really him doing the reading. The way that Fesperman changes voices, accents, gender-inflections, and the like, makes Safe Houses one of my all-time favorite audiobooks. Fesperman proves here that not only can he write a good story, he can tell a good story.

It all starts in 1979 West Berlin when Helen Abell, a 22-year-old CIA secretary/clerk who has been assigned the task of overseeing the Agency’s Berlin safe house network, in a single day overhears two conversations that greatly trouble her. Helen is only in the safehouse to make sure that things are still in order since her last visit.  While upstairs checking the integrity of the recording equipment in the house, she hears two unidentifiable agents enter downstairs for a meeting that is not on the schedule she maintains for the Agency. She is mystified by what she hears – and inadvertently records – but she senses that something is very, very wrong about their conversation. A few hours later, when she returns to the safe house to erase the damning tape, Helen overhears – and witnesses – something even more personally disturbing.

Now, Helen is on the radar of a rogue CIA agent who will do anything to protect his reputation and status inside the Agency. This is a man who has a long memory, friends within the Agency who are just as ruthless as him, and all the tools he needs to eliminate anyone who threatens him. He has just about everything but a conscious. His memory is, in fact, so long that Helen will never feel safe for the rest of her life.

Dan Fesperman

Flash forward to a chicken farm in present day Maryland where a young man has just been arrested for the brutal double-murder of his parents. The young man in question has been under psychiatric care most of his life, but he has never indicated a capacity for violent behavior. His sister knows that something has gone terribly, unexpectedly, wrong in her family home, and she wants to know why it happened. But when she and the investigator she hires suddenly find themselves running for their own lives, it begins to look as if she won’t live long enough to get any answers.

Bottom Line: Considering everything we’ve learned recently about the CIA and the FBI, Safe Houses is a thriller that would have seemed more farfetched in 2018 when it was published than it does today. That said, this is a solid thriller centered around three young women who decide they can no longer ignore the sordid behavior of a handful of their male colleagues. The women are willing to risk their careers and their lives to set things right – and some of them will indeed lose both.