A LETTER FROM THE PAST FORCES A DISGRACED BUREAUCRAT TO CONFRONT HIS
FUTURE
TANGIER 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.
