Secrets Among Friends
Two best friends. A death shrouded in mystery. A love triangle.
And a trail of dark secrets dating back to World War II.
When Paul Pandolfo accepts a consulting job in Southeastern Europe at the invitation of his charismatic boyhood friend Tom Fairbanks—now the CEO of a European consumer goods company—he expects nothing more than a personal and professional reunion. Instead, he arrives to devastating news: Tom is dead, allegedly from a heart attack. But the details don’t add up.
Haunted by a shared past and a romantic betrayal, Paul sets out to uncover the truth behind Tom’s final days, especially an ambitious project he was working on called The Network—a seemingly random collection of factories, research and technical centers, and distribution hubs in surprising locations that would represent the largest ever investment in consumer goods in this part of the world.
As he retraces Tom’s steps through his family’s history in Hungary and the fractured landscape of the post-Yugoslav Balkans, he begins to suspect that there may have been much more to the man he thought he knew.
The action moves around the murky backwaters of central and eastern Europe, from Serbia to Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Hungary, each providing a piece of the puzzle. The novel conveys a strong sense of place in a little-known part of the world. While the setting is the contemporary world of today, the reader learns a lot about the region’s troubled history, from World War II to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s to the conflicts of today.
Told with a wry, introspective voice and driven by an ever-deepening mystery, Secrets Among Friends is a deeply layered exploration of friendship, ambition, and the legacy of family.
Part travelogue, part elegy, and part political intrigue, this intelligent and emotionally charged novel asks: How well do we ever really know the people closest to us?
Mark Ciccone
Mark Ciccone is a semi-retired world traveler who worked for thirty-two years for Procter and Gamble in various senior management positions, where he traveled widely in the US and abroad, including a stint living in Italy.
He subsequently became a consultant with Monitor (now Monitor Deloitte) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then the president of a boutique consulting firm specializing in strategy and innovation.
He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where he has taught twice: once as a graduate student in English and, more recently, as an instructor in the business school at the university’s campus in Rome.
He lives in the suburbs of Boston with his wife, Eileen. They have four daughters and one granddaughter. His hobbies include travel, history, skiing, and following the Boston sports teams.
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