If 20 years of news about the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia into a half dozen ethnically embattled countries is confusing, perhaps Alen Mattich's entertaining first Marko della Torre thriller can help. Set in Croatia just before the U.S.S.R. unraveled and Yugoslavia splintered, Zagreb Cowboy unveils former dictator Tito's infamous federal secret police agency, U.D.B.A. (Yugoslavia's version of the K.G.B.), and the corrupt local cops and bureaucrats of Croatia's capital. Raised in Ohio by his now-deceased American mother and Croatian professor father, della Torre has lived in Zagreb with his father since his 20s and works for the newly established U.D.B.A. internal affairs division. To open doors in his investigations, della Torre finds himself selling classified documents to the powerful Zagreb police Captain Strumbic, who then resells them to add to his illicit wealth. Neither trusts the other, but when one document threatens to expose a secret international sale of weapons-grade nuclear fuel centrifuges, both men find themselves targets of inept Bosnian assassins hired by old-school Belgrade politicos.
Zagreb-born Mattich is a London columnist for the Wall Street Journal with a flair for comic dialogue and an eye for Croatia's "artificially lit, nicotine-tinted wash of concrete tower blocks." He propels his thriller down the dark roads of imploding Yugoslavia and across borders to the wealthy Hampstead parks of London. Della Torre's estranged wife describes him as just "an unreformed Communist, already nostalgic for the days when you could pass a whole leisurely morning queuing up for a loaf of bread." Who needs CNN when Mattich can nail the heart of old Yugoslavia so precisely? --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.