Customer Reviews

Layover in Dubai

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Road weary American auditor Sam Keller is in his twentieth nation as an employee of Pfluger Klaxon. He and his business companion Charlie Hatcher are in Dubai when the latter is murdered. Although Sam vomits twice at the sight of the blown away Charlie, the cops believe he is the killer so he flees rather than take his chances on Middle East justice even if Dubai is a very westernized center.

He soon finds the Russian Mafia and his own pharmaceutical company want him dead. Dubai police officer Anwar Sharaf believes the American is innocent as the alleged motive fails to hold up under minor scrutiny. However, his investigation leads to him on run from his corrupt peers, the Russians and the hired guns of Sam's firm.

This is an exciting over the top of the Burj Khalifa as the audience gets a close up look at perhaps the most capitalist center in the world conflicted between money and religious beliefs. Fast-paced, Sharaf makes the tale work as he rejects the mainstream bias news, jealous peers and deadly others who threaten his loved ones to insure the right people are arrested. Sam pales in comparison to him during his Layover in Dubai.

Harriet Klausner

The author lived several weeks in Dubai researching this book. Gives you a feeling for Dubai and to some extent the importance of personal relationships in doing business in the UAE. Mostly, this book is a lot of fun! Informative and entertaining!

"Layover in Dubai" was certainly the best book of the summer. It kept me guessing until the last few pages. As a past resident of the Arabian Gulf, I can attest to the fact that the author had his cultural facts straight and it was clear he has been to the Gulf or had an editor who knows the region personally. I give this book a top rating and recommend it to all mystery/murder fans.

I liked it but not to the point of a whole-hearted endorsement. The plot was somewhat contrived but following the story through the streets of Dubai and the desert kept my interest. I could never figure out whether this was a tale of corporate greed, prostitution or government corruption. Take it to beach but don't expect anything unusual.

Absolutely riveting. His best book yet. You hate to see it end. I would give it 6 stars if there were any!

Thriller writer Fesperman has a gift for conveying a sense of place, from the smells and sights and sounds to a real understanding of the way another culture's rules work and the conflicts that erupt between tradition and modernity.

He has set his exceptional books in hot spots all over the world, most notably war-torn Sarajevo (Lie in the Dark, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows), Gitmo (The Prisoner of Guantanamo), the Middle-East (The Amateur Spy), and Afghanistan (The Warlord's Son).

His latest is set in Dubai, capitalism's capital of the world, which doesn't have quite the same epic sense of history. What it does have is a glittering surface over a soft underbelly of corruption into which Fesperman adroitly burrows.

His American protagonist is Sam Keller, an auditor for Pfluger Klaxon, a giant pharmaceutical company. Once something of a daredevil, Keller has trained himself to toe the line. The attractive and intimidating head of corporate security has sent him to Dubai to let loose a little - and keep an eye on a colleague with a reputation for women and booze.

Keller isn't particularly comfortable with the assignment but he's a lot less comfortable when his co-worker ends up murdered in one of Dubai's cheaper brothels.

Keller then has to navigate the police - first a mix of Egyptian, Sudanese and Jordanian underlings, then the smooth-talking Lt. Assad and, finally, the rumpled Anwar Sharaf, a Dubai native who finds himself overwhelmed by the pace of modernization and in constant conflict with his headstrong and beloved daughter Amina.

Keller and Sharaf form an uneasy alliance as the murder becomes more complicated, and witnesses begin turning up dead. The relationship between Sharaf and Keller and Amina percolates appealingly as they navigate the separate worlds of heady, grasping wealth, traditional Muslim tribal culture, and the vast underclass of foreign workers. Fesperman fully conveys the bizarreness of this precarious-seeming place and delivers a solid action thriller along the way.

I enjoyed this book with some reservations which I shall explain later. Unlike some of the reviewers here (eg HK) I have actually read it and enjoyed it.

The ostensible protagonist Sam Keller, an auditor for a pharmaceutical company, finds himself sent on a side-trip to Dubai to keep tabs on a workmate, who promptly becomes a corpse. The rest of the book is concerned with how Sam extricates from this situation as well as determining who was behind the murder and for what reason.

Unusually, Sam is really not the central character of the book. Arguably, there are 3 or 4 central characters - Sam, his deceased workmate Charley, the inevitable cop Lt Anwar Sharaf and his libertine (by Dubai standards) daughter Laleh.

Sharaf is a likeable savvy cop stuck in the frontlines of an investigation with obscure connections that go all the way up. In some ways, he is a little like Inspector Chen in "Death of a Red Heroine" but with considerably more moxie. As we see the investigation through his and other character's eyes we get to learn a lot about that bizarre fly-speck called Dubai. (I have to confess that I've never been there. However, I've always been interested in the place ever since the days 40 years ago when I used to play foosball at the Bun Shop in Cambridge with Sheik Mohammed's brother, Peter.)

The Sharaf family character development is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel. If anything Sam is something of an innocent and passive bystander until the less than satisfactory action that concludes the book. I see the possibility of a sequel involving at least 2 of the surviving characters either in Dubai or in the USA.

What did I find weakest about this book? Well, I suppose you have to grant many books a pass on overall credibility as many plots require you to suspend disbelief simply to move things along. What disappointed me was the almost non-existent rationale for Sam's employer, the pharmaceutical company. Several of the main characters are employees of the company and yet there is essentially no connection between the company's business and the actual skulduggery that occurs.

With Amazon reviews any piece of dreck gets 4 and 5 stars routinely. This entertaining through average book got way below average reviews. Perhaps because of its unfamiliar setting. The author is no Gulf expert but he spent some time there and absorbed enough to make the book's setting come alive. I have only passed through the Dubai airport but I have worked in Yemen, Qatar and Oman and he has a good enough feel for the small Gulf states with too much money and dependent on foreigners to keep things running. I thought the love interest with a local girl was a bit much but I'm sure it happens. I just wouldn't try it.

I really enjoyed this book, not only for its detective type story but also interesting references to Dubai and its culture. It was really exciting to read about a faraway place with cultural references that described a place I have never been to. Perhaps the story is not 100% plausible, but this is fiction and I found myself liking the bits of luck along the way. I enjoyed it.

I don't think Layover in Dubai is going to go down in the annals of great English literature. But I read it and enjoyed it and thought that it was a reasonably exciting story set in a fascinating locale. I agree that some of the plot conventions have been done before but how many totally realistic thrillers have there ever been? Not many. And the main characters were pretty appealing and the criminal enterprise at the center of the story was very plausible.