THE PRISONER OF GUANTANAMO by Dan Fesperman

This is a tightly held, yet also a slow burner of a thriller starring a manly hero called Rever Fatk. Falk has had a chequered work history as have most of these thriller type heroes, so full of cliched personality faults, troubled relationships, mysterious friends and ex partners. But still a riveting read, our hero trying to uncover corruption, save lives, including his own, dealing with betrayal, turn coats and turn abouts. Top reading in other words.

The setting is new! Guantanamo Bay detention camp at the US Guantanamo Navel Base on the coast of Cuba. An overload of plot devices before the story has even started! Falk is an interrogator for the FBI, interrogating prisoners taken in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen in the US's relentless pursuit of terrorists and undesirables. The base is  an island hot bed of gossip, paranoia, the Cubans just around the corner. The discovery of the body of a US Marine on the Cuban side of things throws the army base into complete turmoil, reaching far up into the echelons of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon. Flak is unwittingly drawn into the mess when he is put in charge of investigating the death of the soldier. He himself becomes a target, and he has to reach deep into himself to save himself and somehow still expose the secrets and coverups.Such vivid and descriptive writing of the geography of the island, the access, the turbulent seas around it, how such an environment affects the people on the base.  I have no desire to go to Guantanamo - bleak, uninviting where many horrible things happen in secret. Scary.