Book description
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 attache from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged
for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, with war coming to Europe, and
French and German operatives locked in a life-and-death struggle on the
espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache,
Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is
drawn in to 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, amidst an extraordinary cast
of venal and dangerous characters -- Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish
military intelligence, last seen in Furst's The Polish Officer; the
mysterious and sophisticated Doctor 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 Spies of Warsaw is Alan
Furst's finest novel to date -- the history is precise, the writing
evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel --
exciting, atmospheric, erotic and impossible to put down. Alan Furst
has lived for long periods in France, especially in Paris, and has
travelled as a journalist in Eastern Europe and Russia. He has written
extensively for Esquire and the International Herald Tribune. He lives
in New York state.
