An autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the
Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish
mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory
district, he will meet with the military attaché from the
French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So
begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan
Furst, lauded by The New York Times as “America’s
preeminent spy novelist.”
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-Francois 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 Mercier’s brutal and vindictive
opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And
there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some
never to be revealed.
The Houston Chronicle has described Furst as “the greatest
living writer of espionage fiction.” The Spies of Warsaw is
his finest novel to date–the history precise, the writing
evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy
novel, exciting, atmospheric, erotic, and impossible to put
down.
“As close to heaven as popular fiction can get.”
–Los Angeles Times, about The Foreign Correspondent
“What gleams on the surface in Furst’s books is his vivid,
precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter-perfect re-
creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe
that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway
station.”
–Time
“A rich, deeply moving novel of suspense that is equal
parts espionage thriller, European history and love story.”
–Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times, about Dark Star
“Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your
dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they
seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the
novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of
espionage to illuminate history and politics with
immediacy.”
–Nancy Pate, Orlando Sentinel
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