U.S. Embassy in Manila, Philippines during the tumultuous overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos. Now retired from the State Department, Kaplan is currently a partner in Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe LLP’s Washington, D.C law office, where his practice is focused on public and private international law. He lives in Washington, DC.
Kaplan is the author of the suspenseful thriller, Night in Tehran.
At CrimeReads he tagged five "remarkable novels that pose similar choices as to how fictional characters (but in fact real people) confront challenges on missions in foreign countries and the impact these missions could have domestically and even globally." One title on the list:
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric AmblerRead about the other entries on the list.
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “one of the undisputed masterpieces of the genre.” It is the classic story of an average man named Charles Latimerseemingly out of his depth. A chance encounter leads Latimer, who is a mystery novelist, into a world of political intrigue. Latimer meets a Colonel of the Turkish secret police who professes to be a fan of his novels. The Colonel tells him of the notorious Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue. Latimer decides to track down people who may know what Dimitrios did and uncover the story of his murder. Latimer is cast into a web of espionage, drug smuggling and assassination. The pursuit of mere mystery leads him into an elusive net of moral ambiguity. Latimer is warned that, “The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.”
A Coffin for Dimitrios is among Nicola DeRobertis-Theye's five top novels of biographical detection, Thomas H. Cook's top ten mystery books, Charles Cumming's top five works on espionage, and Otto Penzler's best thrillers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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