In Charlotte native's recent novel, spies lurk in Berlin

After earning a journalism degree at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Charlotte native Dan Fesperman enjoyed a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. He then found a second vocation, writing novels of espionage and intrigue in the manner of John Le Carre and Alan Furst.

One of these, "The Prisoner of Guantanamo" (2006), took its hero to Navassa, the Caribbean island, once rich in bird guano, that lent its name to the Brunswick County town.

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Fesperman's latest, "Winter Work," (Knopf, $28) continues in this vein, with a yarn about the last days of the Cold War that should chill a steamy summer afternoon.

The opening could be straight out of Martin Cruz Smith. It's 19900, the winter after the Berlin Wall was torn down. Emil Grimm is walking in the woods outside his dacha outside Berlin.

Grimm is soon to lose his job as a colonel in the Ministry of State Security or "Stasi," the dreaded East German secret police. He had served in the foreign intelligence branch, peppering NATO and the West German government with moles and infiltrators.

Now, he finds his old friend, Lothar Fischer, a fellow Stasi colonel, lying dead by a lake, his service revolver in his right hand and a bullet hole in his temple.

The police think suicide. Emil does not. He knows his old friend Lothar was left-handed.

Meanwhile, CIA case officer Claire Saylor has arrived in Berlin from Paris. A bidding war has broken out. The Americans want to recruit as many former Stasi spies as they can and pump them for their secrets. The Russian KGB, which is not breaking up, is trying to gather as many as it can, to identify Stasi sources in the West and flip them to its side.

Claire, who's not a familiar face, has been assigned to rendezvous with a high-ranking Stasi spymaster — one Lothar Fischer.

Claire and Emil will eventually cross paths, though it takes readers a while to figure out what Emil is up to.  Emil lied to the German police; he hasn't been estranged from Lothar, and they were collaborating on a project. But what is it?

Meanwhile, other people besides Lothar are turning up dead. As Claire's old mentor, the retired spy Clark Baucom notes, in the Cold War, each side had a gentleman's agreement; they didn't kill each other's people. Now, suddenly, the agreement is off.

Fesperman spent much of the 1990s based in Berlin. Besides writing a taut thriller, he recreates the atmospherics of the divided city, from the dark beer halls to the grungy artists' colonies. Readers get a bracing travelogue, and a change in temperature, for the cost of a single volume.

Fesperman notes that all this has a basis in fact, specifically the U.S. Operation Rosenholz, generally counted as one of the CIA's great Cold War triumphs. A number of real people lurk in the book's shadows, along with the book's shadows. Vladimir Putin, who was then a KGB officer based nearby in Dresden, Germany, gets a cameo mention.

New Hanover Friends of the Library

In the old days, summer used book sales at the Northeast Regional Library lasted one day, tops. Now, however, the New Hanover Friends of the Library's summer book sale will stretch over two full weekends, in the library at 1241 Military Cutoff Road.

The sale opens from 5:30-9 p.m. Friday with the Friends' "members only" sale. (Non-members can join at the door for just $20.)

The sale continues from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 1-5 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 6 and 3-7 p.m. on Monday, August 7.

Proceeds benefit the county library system. Since 1983, Friends' sales have raised more than  $1 million for the New Hanover County Public Library.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Spies lurk in Berlin in 'Winter Work'