BOOK REVIEW: THE EXPEDITER
By Kenneth Dekleva
Reviewed by: Bill Harlow
The Reviewer — Bill Harlow served as chief spokesman for the CIA from 1997 to 2004 and was Assistant White House Press Secretary for National Security from 1988 to 1992. He is the senior book editor for The Cipher Brief. A retired Navy captain, Harlow is the co-author of four New York Times bestsellers on intelligence and is the author of Circle William: A Novel.
REVIEW: There are some novels where the fiction seems to eerily anticipate forthcoming events. Kenneth Dekleva's The Expediter is one of them. Written before Operation Epic Fury's opening strikes thrust the IRGC into front-page news, the novel reads today less like fiction than like a dispatch from a parallel reality, one in which the long human costs of America's (and sometimes Israel's) tangled relationship with Iran, Bosnia, and the unhealed wounds of twentieth-century proxy warfare are rendered not in target coordinates and battle-damage assessments, but in the broken interior lives of the people involved.
Dekleva's singular advantage is authenticity and he earns it on multiple fronts. In a Cipher Brief podcast in April 2025 he said he is the son of Yugoslav immigrants and he grew up steeped in Cold War history, hitchhiking across what is now Slovenia at fourteen and becoming fluent in the language. That personal history gave him an unusually intimate relationship with the region long before diplomacy entered the picture. A practicing psychiatrist who spent fourteen years as a Regional Medical Officer with the State Department, posted in Moscow, Mexico City, New Delhi, Vienna, and London, Dekleva brings to his fiction the discipline that defined his career: understanding what makes people act the way they do, and why.
The Expediter, his fourth novel, opens with a chapter that will stop readers cold, a tightly restricted narration through the consciousness of a five-year-old non-verbal autistic Muslim boy in Dallas. Dekleva's psychiatric expertise gives the boy's inner life a rare authenticity. The child’s death, which sets the novel's investigation in motion, is not an abstraction.
What follows is a cold-case procedural, a geopolitical thriller, and a meditation on war trauma, displacement, and redemption, often a mélange of all at once. The murdered boy's mother, a Bosnian refugee who has already survived genocide and successive personal losses, engages a former DEA operative and, through him, a former Vatican diplomat with a classified past, to pursue what the Dallas Police cannot close.
As the trail moves from Dallas to Sarajevo to Vienna, and the answers, when they come, carry no comfort and no simple justice. One of the novel's quieter pleasures is watching Dekleva's ensemble of investigators, diplomats, and intelligence officers approach this case for their stated reasons, justice, duty, professional obligation, while being driven beneath the surface by something older and more personal: unpaid debts, wartime loyalty, and the unfinished business of lives that were never fully left behind.
The novel's psychological architecture is where Dekleva's medical authority becomes literary authority. The concept of a "catathymic crisis," a sudden emotional eruption in a person carrying long-suppressed traumatic grief, is not a thriller device here. It is a clinical reality rendered with diagnostic precision, tracing the roots of violence back through the Ahmici massacre of 1993, the Iran-Iraq war's chemical weapons battlefields, and the accumulated silences of a displaced life.
The novel is also more theologically ambitious than its thriller trappings might suggest. Questions of sin, absolution, redemption, and spiritual conversion run through nearly every major character, culminating in a late-novel papal initiative to broker interfaith peace between Christianity and Islam, a vision that resonates with the Catholic Church's own recent real-world outreach to the Islamic world.
Where the novel occasionally strains is in asking the reader to accept that resolution on faith: a conversion at the story's heart, spiritually central to everything that follows, is rendered more as a sudden awakening than as the hard-won interior journey it might otherwise be.
The novel is compact but calls on the reader to pay close attention due to the ambitious use of multiple occasional first-person narrators. What carries the reader through is Dekleva's sure-footed sense of place. Settings are richly rendered, from the Dallas park where the story begins to the coffee houses, monasteries, and diplomatic salons of Sarajevo and Vienna. Readers who know those cities will recognize them; those who don't will feel as though they do.
The novel's resonance with current events is impossible to ignore. The Expediter engages seriously with questions about the IRGC's covert history, Iran's proxy networks, Israel’s clandestine engagement and the human beings inside that machinery, questions that Operation Epic Fury has made urgently current. The real-world operation's opening strikes killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and senior IRGC leadership, but analysts have suggested the succession produced a more hardline, IRGC-dominated regime. A central geopolitical question in the novel is what kind of Iran and what kind of Iranian leadership can emerge from the ruins of the present order. It is a live policy problem, with live ammunition behind it.
In a season when Operation Epic Fury has reminded the world that Iran is a civilization of 90 million people, and that the IRGC's officers are not abstractions but men with childhoods, losses, and scarred hands, The Expediter arrives as a valuable corrective to the satellite imagery. Dekleva has spent a career understanding what drives people, in the clinic, in the embassy, and around the world. In this novel, he brings all of it to bear.
The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.
Sign up for our free Undercover newsletter to make sure you stay on top of all of the new releases and expert reviews.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business
