Unmanned

A psychologically gripping descent into the eerie realm of drone warfare, led by one pilot's risky quest to expose its darkest secrets.

As an F-16 fighter pilot, Darwin Cole was a family man on top of his world. Now he's a washout-drunk and alone in a trailer in the Nevada desert, and haunted by what he saw on the display of the Predator drone he "piloted," especially by the memory of an Afghan child running for her life. He reluctantly teams up with three journalists seeking to discover the identity of the anonymous-and possibly rogue-intelligence operative who called the shots in Cole's ill-fated drone mission. But in a surveillance culture, even the well-intentioned must sometimes run for their lives, especially when they're tracking leads to the very heart of that culture-in intelligence, in the military, and among 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.

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 Guantanamo won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers. He lives in Baltimore.