What is the point of investigating a single death when your city and your country is being killed around you? For Fesperman's Sarajevo sleuth Investigator Petric part of the answer is that being a homicide cop keeps him out of the army and out of the front line in the hills a few miles away and in the city instead where he can at least phone the wife and child he has sent to safety. Another part of the answer is the simple bad attitude that he shares with most other heroes of noir detective fiction, a feeling that the job has to be done no matter how many toes he treads on. The corpse shot at close range and left to look like a sniper's victim is that of a senior figure in the security service, a man who used the local gangs to save the city from the Serbs and then turned on them when they got ambitious. Petric finds himself fed information by people who use him and threaten him--secret policemen, gangsters, whores, foreign journalists and black marketeers. This is a powerful and ingenious thriller drawn from last year's headlines but as timely today. --Roz Kaveney