The Foreign Correspondent

Starred review from April 10, 2006
Furst's reputation as one of today's best writers, in any genre, is further solidified by this gripping historical thriller with echoes of Graham Greene, which opens in Paris in December 1938. Journalist Carlo Weisz, an expatriate Italian who's half Slav, is fighting the Mussolini regime by writing for the Paris-based underground opposition newspaper, the Liberazione
. When agents of the OVRA, the Italian secret police, murder the Liberazione
's editor in the arms of his mistress, Weisz assumes greater responsibility for keeping the paper running. OVRA also targets Weisz and his surviving colleagues, forcing him to scramble to stay alive while continuing his subversive work. Furst (Night Soldiers
) excels at characterization, making even secondary figures such as shadowy presences from British intelligence and Nazi minders more than cartoon stereotypes. Through the exploits of his understated hero, Furst presents a potent portrait of Europe on the eve of WWII.

Alan Furst's smoky "noir" novels are addictive, and no less are George Guidall's smoke-and-gravel performances of them. This one is set, as Furst's books often are, in the last years of the 1930s, as Europe feels the moral climate darken and the reader knows what deluge is coming. Carlo Weisz, half-Slavic, half-Italian, and wholly anti-Fascist, is a Reuters correspondent. When the editor of an underground Italian resistance paper is murdered, Carlo is half-drawn, half-pressured into taking over. Furst's characters are shape-shifting and world-weary, resigned to a climate full of shadows. Guidall's voice is older than that of the main characters but suits the material perfectly, since Furst's is a world in which no one is young, except perhaps Carlo's appealing German lover in Berlin. B.G. 2007 Audies Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine