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Postmarked Prague The Central European winter approaches, and though it is a cold and bitter season, cloaked in fog and the choking fumes of sulphurous coal, I do not despair. Why? Because last year I discovered Alan Furst's novels, was wise enough not to read all of them at once, and so have three of the most historically rich, atmospheric, densely plotted and absolutely thrilling spy novels ever written to see me through the winter. If you like historical novels, read DARK STAR. Europe's most eminent historians rave about it. If you crave a spy novel as good or better than anything written by LeCarre or Graham Greene, read DARK STAR. If you have a taste for both historical and espionage fiction, be prepared to spend most of this winter indoors, reading Alan Furst. In DARK STAR, Pravda journalist Andre Szara is trying to stay alive in the treacherous climate of the 1930's Soviet Union. He's a survivor. He knows how to curry favor with those in power, and how to write just well enough - but not too well - to please his superiors. Occasionally, an intelligence officer from the NKVD asks him to perform a small task in service of the State, but nothing dangerous nor more morally compromising than the lies he writes for Pravda. Szara may be a journalist hack, but he has the soul of a poet. But then one of the favors he performs for the NKVD leads to the assassination of an important agent, and Szara is recruited, quite against his will, as an intelligence officer himself. But precisely who has recruited him, and for whom is he spying? The intelligence officer who recruits him gives the correct signals but is a stranger. His superiors at Pravda claim ignorance, and are soon purged. Szara is posted to Prague, falls in love in Paris, and is spying in Berlin when the dark night of World War II crashes over the European landscape. As the narrative races along historical events traced with accuracy and verve, Szara is moved about the chessboard of Europe, from city to city, a pawn in an Uber war of intelligence agencies, one of which is at war with itself. Just brilliant. Robert Eversz Author of SHOOTING ELVIS And KILLING PAPARAZZI
Reviewed by Robert Eversz, December 2001
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