AUTHOR: Alan Furst
While I've never found a novel by Alan Furst impossible to put down, I've always found them to be immensely readable. This one was a quick read for me, fairly short with less description than his earlier books, as if he expects that his regular readers are, by now, familiar with the situation in France during fall of 1942 and early 1943. The main character, Paul Ricard, is a writer of popular detective novels. When a man is shot in front of him by the police and slips Ricard a drawn schematic of a torpedo detonator before he dies, Ricard -- a French patriot -- endeavors to get the drawing to the right people.
The book takes a familiar direction, that of a civilian drawn into the realm of espionage, in this case, doing jobs for the French Resistance. Ricard is aided by a Polish ex-patriot named Kasia, who works in a bookshop and is a thief on the side. Kasia is a bit of a surprise, in that her sexual partners of choice are female, which eliminates her as a lover for Ricard. In a change of pace, there are fewer scenes of lovemaking than usually are found in Furst's novels. His more recent WWII spy novels follow an episodic formula and, in a way, fill in gaps of a giant jigsaw puzzle, all connecting in some way to form a picture of what life in Europe was like as Hitler moved to conquer Europe.
I do wish Furst would turn his attention to the time around the Normandy invasion, but for now, I'm content with whatever he feels compelled to write. Given the current world situation, it's almost a comfort to be reminded of a time when right and wrong were clear.
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