Furst (The Foreign Correspondent) solidifies his status as a master of historical spy fiction with this compelling thriller set in 1937 Poland. Col. Jean-Francois Mercier, a military attache at the French embassy in Warsaw who runs a network of spies, plays a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with his German adversaries. When one of Mercier's main agents, Edvard Uhl, an engineer at a large Dusseldorf arms manufacturer who's been a valuable source on the Nazis' new weapons, becomes concerned that the Gestapo is on to him, Mercier initially dismisses Uhl's fears. Mercier soon realizes that the risk to his spy is genuine, and he's forced to scramble to save Uhl's life. The colonel himself later takes to the field when he hears reports that the German army is conducting maneuvers in forested terrain. Even readers familiar with the Germans' attack through the Ardennes in 1940 will find the plot suspenseful. As ever, Furst excels at creating plausible characters and in conveying the mostly tedious routines of real espionage. Author tour. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

*Starred Review* It's the autumn of 1937, and the shadows of war are darkening over Warsaw. Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, military attaché with the French embassy (a spy, that is), doesn't like what he's hearing, wherever he snoops. The Poles know trouble is coming but aren't prepared for it, and the French, who might still be able to prepare, are convinced they are impregnable. As spies from throughout Europe gather at sundry diplomatic functions to trade innuendos, Mercier stumbles across what could be the real thing: access to a renegade Nazi who might be able to broker a deal that could give the French knowledge of German attack plans. This is Furst's wheelhouse, of course, Europe sliding toward war, intelligence flowing as freely as wine in every café, romance (a shadow sport, like espionage) flourishing as tanks gather at the border. Furst uses essentially the same setting (Warsaw stands in for Paris this time) and establishes the same mood in most of his novels, but he always gives us something new, some heretofore unrevealed angle of vision. This time it's a behind-the-scenes look at French spies trying to convince French politicians to open their eyes. That's the big picture, but as always, it's the human side of the drama that draws us: Mercier, the career soldier, falling in love at the wrong time with a Polish lawyer and attempting to carve out an individual life in the midst of international chaos. Nobody does this stuff better than Furst because nobody can dramatize like he can the horrible realization that somebody else's politics will soon obliterate daily life as you know it.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist

Furst's latest novel is sure to be counted as one of the very best of the historical espionage genre. Literate, admirably plotted, and featuring a memorable protagonist, it is realistic and sad but hopeful and romantic. A highly competent French army officer, Jean-Francois Mercier is assigned in 1937 to military attache duty in Warsaw, a position recognized by all as an opportunity, if not a duty, to engage in spying. Mercier is a World War I combat-wounded hero, a widower whose behavior reveals a nobility and a sense of honor mostly lacking in today's fiction heroes. Using Polish and German agents, he engages in thrilling derring-do and soon recognizes the sinister intentions of the Nazis, which the French high command apparently chooses to ignore. He does his best to alert the French General Staff, especially as to German invasion strategy. Furst brilliantly captures the setting, along with the cynicism of the Warsaw sociopolitical scene. His presentation of Mercier's romantic interludes with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage is sophisticated, elegant, and discreet. Enthusiastically recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/08.]--Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ., Stanislaus (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

THE queasy thrill of prewar espionage doesn't come from the prospect of war, or even the spying; it comes from the moral compromises forced by fear and accommodation. Alan Furst has always had a knack for conveying how the one begets the other. "The light had gone out, it seemed, the very notion of heroism excised," is how he described Stalinist Russia in "Dark Star," an early novel. That world was "now filled with soft, bruised, frightened people scheming over a few lumps of coal or a spoonful of sugar." Spy novels tend to focus on the few people who rise above self-interest, but the best also give voice to those who don't. Furst's latest, "The Spies of Warsaw," begins with just such a specimen: Edvard Uhl, a plodding, middle-aged German engineer with business in Poland who on the eve of the war is seduced, then blackmailed into slipping military secrets to French intelligence. Uhl feels the occasional pang of fright, but not guilt. "In such chaotic times," his French handler reasons with him, "smart people understood that their first loyalty was to themselves and their families." Characters who are braver or more farsighted have a special doomed poignancy. Furst's tales, usually set in Paris and Eastern Europe and entwined around the Nazis or the Soviet secret police, are infused with the melancholy romanticism of "Casablanca," and also a touch of Arthur Koestler's novel "Darkness at Noon." "The Spies of Warsaw" follows Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, a French aristocrat and veteran of World War I who, as the military attaché in Warsaw, studies German preparations for war. He runs agents and conducts some risky fieldwork of his own, but it doesn't take much for him to deduce that Hitler plans to go around the Maginot Line and invade through Belgium: articles in German military journals all but spell it out. Official France pays no heed. Most assignments in historical thrillers are futile: readers know what's coming, while those characters who suspect the worst cannot fully comprehend the looming cataclysm even as they risk their lives trying to forestall it. The mission in a Furst novel is never as interesting as the men and women who volunteer - or are forced - to complete it. Polish counts, SS officers, French film producers, damsels and demi-mondaines are drawn into the action, but so are Jewish Bolsheviks, Slav partisans, Hungarian diplomats and Bulgarian fishermen. From Lisbon to Malmo, Furst's novels are full of stark contrasts and weird congruities: he links the Bulgarian National Union marching along the Danube to expatriates in Paris ordering Champagne and another platter of oysters at the fashionable Brasserie Heininger. As in Balzac's "Human Condition," characters who loom large in one novel reappear as minor figures in another, sometimes at the next table in Heininger's, where one mirror, cracked by a bullet, is left unrepaired as a memorial to the day thugs shot up the dining room and left the Bulgarian headwaiter dead in the ladies room. It is there, in fact, over choucroute and Champagne, that Mercier briefs one of the few French generals who share his mistrust of Pétain's defense strategy. The other, of course, is Charles de Gaulle, after whom Furst has clearly modeled Mercier; the fictional Mercier is an old friend of de Gaulle's and shares much of his life story. Like de Gaulle, Mercier has aristocratic roots, graduated from military school in the class of 1912, spent time in a German prison camp during World War I and helped Polish troops fight the Red Army in 1920. But whereas de Gaulle eventually returned to Paris, Furst's hero is redeployed to the French Embassy in Poland. Furst's early works were thickly braided with history, subplots and dozens of vividly drawn minor characters. But even masters of the genre can slow down, stretch material and fall back on formula. His previous novel, "The Foreign Correspondent," about an Italian newspaperman in Paris and Berlin, was not very convincing. "The Spies of Warsaw" is more satisfying, but it too seems thin: the plot is spare, and Mercier - a tall, handsome, rich widower - is de Gaulle as Harlequin romance hero. FURST is often likened to Graham Greene and John le Carré, in part because he delves so persuasively into the darker corners of history, marking the ambivalence and moral ambiguities of those who play a part in shaping it. He is equally at ease describing the hors d'oeuvres at an embassy party and the Soviet spy schools where recruits are taught to undermine the West but quickly discover that more fearsome enemies lie in the next cot or cubicle. His most memorable heroes turn to clandestine operations not because they are honorable or dutiful but because they have little choice. In "Night Soldiers," Khristo Stoianev, on the run from local fascists, is recruited by a Soviet agent and finds himself trapped in the paranoid and murderous N.K.V.D. at the time of the purges - he is pushed, like tumble-weed in a storm, from Moscow to the Spanish Civil War, then to the shady émigré community of Paris, French prison, the French resistance and eventually New York. In "Dark Star," André Szara, a foreign correspondent for Pravda in the 1930s (modeled on the Russian journalist Ilya Ehrenburg), knows better than to say no when his government's security services request favors in Ostend, Berlin and Prague. Writers sometimes save the best for first. "The Spies of Warsaw" is not as richly complex as earlier Furst novels, but it is still smarter and more soulful than most espionage novels being written today. Alessandra Stanley is the chief television critic for The Times.

As the Nazis openly plan an invasion, France's military attach in Warsaw does a little spying, eats good meals, travels a bit and spends time in pleasant surroundings with a lovely lawyer for the League of Nations. Wounded in the Great War, Col. Jean-Fran‡ois Mercier is a widower with two grown daughters, a vast Parisian apartment, a handsome, slightly shabby country estate and two fine hunting dogs. His current assignment in Poland has him mixing with the local swells--where he picks up bits of information on the tennis court and at dinners--and running a modestly successful intelligence operation involving Herr Uhl, a plump German engineer who swaps details of the Nazis new tank for nights of love with a zaftig "Countess" in Mercier's employ. From the various little bits of information Mercier has gleaned, it becomes depressingly evident that the Nazis are beefing up their tank warfare capability with an eye on the Ardennes forest, the quickest way around the "impregnable" Maginot Line in which France's thick-headed military leaders have placed their total trust. Then the Uhl operation falls apart. An obedient hausfrau sharing his train compartment reports Uhl's nervous behavior to the authorities, resulting in his nearly successful kidnapping by some overeager intelligence agents. Mercier's successful intervention in the snatch earns him a place on the Nazi hit list. Undaunted, the suave Frenchman plans a fake hike on the German border to photograph the latest tank war games, obtaining even more evidence of the Huns' strategy, which will yet again be ignored by the dinosaurs at the top of the French army. Offsetting the frustrations at work is a dalliance with beautiful Anna Szarbek, his blind date at an embassy dinner. Furst (The Foreign Correspondent, 2006, etc.) cuts back a bit on the usual tension, but there is all of the wonderfully wistful late-'30s atmosphere that is his specialty. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.