Alan Furst

Paris, 1938. A shadow edges over Europe. Democratic forces are locked in struggle, while in Spain the war has already begun. Cristian Ferrar, a handsome Spanish lawyer in Paris, is a well-connected man. Ferrar is approached to help a clandestine agency supply weapons to beleaguered Republican forces and agrees, putting his life on the line. Joining Ferrar in his mission is an unlikely group of allies; idealists and gangsters, arms traders and aristocrats, including Max de Lyon, a man hunted by the Gestapo, and the Marquesa Maria Cristina, a refined beauty with a taste for danger. From libertine nightclubs in the City of Light to volatile bars by the docks in Gdansk, Furst paints a spell-binding portrait of a continent marching into a nightmare - and the heroes and heroines who fought back.

War is coming to Europe, & French & German operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn in to a world of abduction, betrayal & intrigue in Warsaw.

Autumn 1937: War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-François Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters -- Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and...

En 1939, cuando los ejércitos europeos se movilizaban para la guerra, el Servicio Secreto británico intentó impedir la exportación del petróleo rumano hacia Alemania. Fracasaron. En el otoño de 1940 volvieron a intentarlo. Serebin, periodista y escritor ruso, romántico y antihéroe, viaja a Estambul huyendo de una Europa en llamas. Allí su encuentro con la fascinante esposa de un diplomático francés, le conduce hasta el servicio de inteligencia británico. La misión encomendada, cortar el suministro de petróleo a los nazis, lleva a Serebin y a su amante francesa de los palacios de Bucarest a los prostíbulos de Izmir; de un elegante club náutico de Estambul a los muelles fluviales de Belgrado, de las pistas de patinaje de St. Moritz a las orillas del Danubio envueltas en la niebla. Todo el continente es una inmensa red de espionaje. Detrás de cada mirada, de cada gesto, de cada sorbo de café hay una trampa y Serebin tiene que evitar caer en ella, conseguir llevar a cabo su tarea, herir de algún modo el poder del ejército invasor.

Septiembre de 1939.Cuando Varsovia está a punto de caer en manos de la Wehrmacht de Hitler, el capitán Alexander de Milja es reclutado por los servicios de Inteligencia de la recién formada Resistencia polaca. Su misión: transportar hasta lugar seguro las reservas de oro del Banco Nacional de Polonia. El apasionante relato de cómo, en toda Europa, hombres y mujeres comunes se convirtieron en héroes de un tiempo sin leyes.

Alan FurstAlan Furst's 14th novel opens in late 1937, in a Warsaw menaced by approaching war and teeming with spies of every stripe. Among them is Colonel Jean-François Mercier, an aristocratic French military attaché and beau idéal of the dashing secret agent. Forty-six years old, his tall frame a palimpsest of war wounds, he is a melancholy widower. Among the many other spies afoot in these pages is German businessman Edvard Uhl, entrapped by a supposed countess into smuggling information on German tank design to the French. Uhl's activities come to the attention of some exceedingly unpleasant Nazi secret agents, and his life becomes a problem for Mercier to solve. The only non-spy in this espionage-steeped arena seems to be Anna Szarbek, a lawyer for the League of Nations and Mercier's serious love interest The novel moves back and forth between Warsaw and Paris with excursions, among them to the Polish-German border where our hero, creeping through the forest in his waxed Barbour field jacket, observes German military preparations and, later, to the Black Forest, where he witnesses tank maneuvers. Both forays produce evidence suggesting German plans of attack for invasions of Poland and France. If you think Mercier manages to convince anyone with authority to act on his discoveries, you have forgotten your history. What we have here is a thrilling, cleverly plotted re-creation of the sort of hugger-mugger, double-dealing, and wishful thinking that marked the last crepuscular years before full-scale war plunged Europe into darkness.

From Alan Furst, whom the New York Times calls "America's preeminent spy novelist," comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts' passion to fight in the war against tyranny. By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini's fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of emigre life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story. Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers' hotel. But this is no romantic tragedy it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini's fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine emigre newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor. Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Surete, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder. The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as "Colonel Ferrara," who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz's life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin. The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.

In another hair-raising black-and-white noir from Alan Furst, World War II is the backdrop, and preventing the enemy from sinking any more merchant ships is the point: in two years, the Allies have lost nearly 1600 vessels. A Dutch ship docked in Tangier, recruited by British intelligence and disguised as a neutral Spanish freighter carrying sardines and cooking oil, is sent to Portugal to pick up some sophisticated espionage technology. Then, under the command of its Dutch captain, Eric DeHaan, the ship--with a passenger list that includes a Russian beauty and a Greek stowaway--will carry a group of commandos on a harrowing voyage to Tunisia, where they hope to destroy the Nazi stronghold--if they aren't destroyed first by a mine or a submarine....

In 1940, as Hitler's troops are marching into Paris, a writer named Serebin finds himself in Istanbul, where he is beginning to realize that, despite his fervent hopes, the world really has become a different place. Hooking up with a Hungarian secret agent, Serebin goes to work for the Allies trying to disrupt German supply lines--an eminently dangerous task to begin with, but his assignment is one that previous agents have tried and failed to complete....

In 1940, as Hitler's troops are marching into Paris, a writer named Serebin finds himself in Istanbul, where he is beginning to realize that, despite his fervent hopes, the world really has become a different place. Hooking up with a Hungarian secret agent, Serebin goes to work for the Allies trying to disrupt German supply lines--an eminently dangerous task to begin with, but his assignment is one that previous agents have tried and failed to complete....

A wonderfully evocative picture of wartime Paris and the moral maze of resistance Mail on Sunday

The sequel to THE WORLD AT NIGHT featuring Jean Casson - Casson could become a cult figure - reluctant spy, utterly disreputable THE TIMES

From the master of the historical spy thriller, a story set in the heart of the Polish resistance

The next great page-turner from the master of the noir spy novel.