Alan Furst and Charles McCarry are the two best spy novelists writing today. Neither of them write books with an excess of action, yet both write gripping page turners, capable of creating suspense and menace by virtue of something as commonplace as a late train. They also write books which are more than just pop fiction. Both of them have heroes who are not the best athletes or the smartest guys or the best equipped; what makes their protagonists special is their character. Alan Furst's heroes do their best, fighting against the unspeakable evils of Naziism and Communism, as well as their own complacent bureaucracies. Furst captures the mood of Europe between the wars and his careful research of the geography and the social milieu creates the feeling, more than one finds in most other novels, that one is not only reading something that actually happened, but that it happened to the reader or to friends of the reader.The Spies of Warsaw is Furst at his best. An aristocratic French colonel sniffs out the German plans for a blitzkreig through the Ardennes, but has trouble convincing French intelligence of the value of what he has discovered. Perhaps it is because I have read most of Furst's books as they came out rather than all at once, but for the first time, I came to realize that all of his books are linked, that the same places, and sometimes, the same people, appear in otherwise unrelated books. The feeling you get if you read all of his books is of a small army of people fighting to stop an onrushing Holocaust. Like a city's subway system, each of his characters and novels run along their own tracks, sometimes intersecting with another, pushing on in their own missions, but all serving the same cause. The result in enthralling and the more Furst novels that get written, the more the reader feels that he is privy to the secrets of a band of patriots, good people all, fighting to slow the inevitable.
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