Lead Review
- Book: The Cover Wife
- Location: Hamburg, Paris
- Author: Dan Fesperman
The Cover Wife is a work of fiction woven around real life events. The 9/11 bombers did, indeed, meet at the Al Quods Mosque in Hamburg to plan their journey to the training camps in Afghanistan and on to the United States (as they do in the book). They were a motley collection of young jihadists convinced that their form of (extreme) Islam was the way to martyrdom and everlasting glory.
The Cover Wife is the story of the observation of the mosque. And it is a quite complicated story involving deception, duplicity, and the passing of information on a strictly ‘need to know’ basis. The CIA and the FBI get in each other’s way – sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. And on occasion the local German police are also involved. No wonder it is seriously compromised.
The cover wife of the title is Claire Saylor, an at times maverick CIA officer working for an equally at times maverick boss, Paul Bridger. Claire and Paul have history from a shared assignment in Berlin a few years previously. Her ostensible mission is to be the ‘wife’ of a US academic who has some pretty outspoken views on interpretation of parts of the Quran – which make him a likely target for an islamist terrorist attack. The academic is publicising a new book and Claire, plus a whole bunch of other operatives, are there to protect him at a launch event in Hamburg. Paul has, though, also asked Claire to spend a couple of hours each evening checking out the happenings at the Al Quods Mosque. She does, and runs across FBI agent Ken Dolan on a similar mission… They become increasingly focussed on Mahmoud, a young guy who has recently joined the mosque. They see him as vulnerable (and turnable) as he has fallen for the estranged (and very Westernised) wife of one of the other mosque attendees.
The story proceeds to a convincing and bloody finale. With a wind up piece in 2000 as the 9/11 attacks unfold.
In TripFiction terms The Cover Wife is an excellent location based thriller. Hamburg comes through sound and clear from the largely immigrant area by the central station (where the Al Quods Mosque is situated on the first floor of an unprepossessing building), to the quieter reaches of the Alster lake, to the industrial suburbs. Hamburg is a city I know reasonably well, and I felt very much at home.
The Cover Wife is quite definitely recommended.
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