Unmanned: A novel

Dan Fesperman

Aug 2014 · Sold by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

About this ebook

From the widely acclaimed author of The Prisoner of Guantánamo and The Double Game, an electrifying, timely, psychologically gripping descent into the hidden, expanding world of drone warfare. • “Timely and disturbing…. An exciting story, expertly told.” —The Washington Post Book World

As an F-16 fighter pilot, Darwin Cole was a family man on top of his world. Now, he’s a washout drunk, living alone in a trailer in the Nevada desert. Haunted by what he saw on the display of the Predator drone he “piloted”—an Afghan child running for her life—he reluctantly joins three journalists seeking to discover the identity of the anonymous, and possibly rogue, intelligence operative who called the shots in his last ill-fated mission. On the trail of this operative, Cole and his new allies will discover the dark heart of our surveillance culture, with connections to intelligence, to the military, and to the unchecked private contractors who stand to profit richly from the advancing technology…technology not just for use “over there,” but for right here, right now.

Ratings and reviews

This is an excellent book. Written evocatively. Well plotted. Believable (though there is a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required, the writing is good enough for you to freely enter that contract). And deeply unsettling in terms of how our world of increasingly ubiquitous surveillance will affect humanity. Well worth reading. Excellent work, Captain Fesperman.

About the author

DAN FESPERMAN's travels as a writer have taken him to thirty countries and three war zones. Lie in the Dark won the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won their Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller, and The Prisoner of Guantánamo won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers. He lives in Baltimore.