© 2017 - Tangier by Stephen Holgate | Published by Blank Slate Press, 2017 | Paperback ISBN: 9781943075287 | E-Book ISBN: 9781943075294

“Now I feel I know nothing,

have never known anything.”

A tale of danger, mystery, betrayal, and redemption, “Tangier” presents the remarkable journey of a father and his son told in parallel stories set fifty years apart: one a mystery; the other a tale of espionage. In the first story, Christopher Chaffee, a disgraced Washington power-broker, travels down the narrow lanes and twisted souls of Tangier’s ancient medina in search of the father he has never known, a French diplomat, who died in a Vichy prison in 1944 – or so he had always believed. In the second story, his father, Rene Laurent, fights to maintain his soul—and his life—in the snake pit of wartime Tangier. These two stories slowly intertwine as Chaffee unwraps the mystery of his father’s fate, and Laurent gets caught up in the intrigue of opposing espionage webs—and caught up, too, in the arms of a woman he knows he shouldn’t trust.

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"Stephen Holgate weaves an exquisite tapestry of wartime espionage, intrigue, and mystery, in his astounding debut novel. The only things missing are Bogart romancing Bergman, and Dooley Wilson (“Sam”) singing 'As Time Goes By'. With a novel-length flashback to 1940s French-occupied Morocco, Tangier is the real Casablanca... Tangier is one of the most satisfying debut novels I’ve enjoyed in decades."

L. Dean Murphy for Bookreporter