Tangier

A LETTER FROM THE PAST FORCES A DISGRACED BUREAUCRAT TO CONFRONT HIS FUTURETANGIER tells two parallel stories: one, a mystery, and the other a spy story set fifty years apart and told in a series of alternating sections. In the first, we follow Christopher Chaffee, a disgraced Washington power broker whose father, a French diplomat, died in a Vichy prison in 1944 or so he had always believed until a letter, received decades after it was posted, upends his life. Soon he is reluctantly inspecting the corkscrew of his own life as he searches the narrow lanes and twisted souls of Tangier's ancient medina in search of the father he never knew. The second is a tale of espionage and betrayal, set in Morocco during WWII. Rene Laurent, Christopher's father, struggles to maintain his integrity and his life in the snake pit of wartime Tangier. The stories slowly intertwine as Christopher unravels the mystery of his father's fate, and Laurent becomes trapped in a web of lies and corruption, and caught up, too, in the arms of a woman he knows he shouldn't trust. Ultimately, TANGIER is the story of fathers and sons, the alienation of being a stranger in a strange land, the seductive face of betrayal and, finally, the lengths we'll go to for redemption.