The Polish Officer and Dark Star are among my favourite novels of all time. He's good at sizing up people, figuring out if they can be trusted. Yet he doesn’t tell her about his secret activities. Paris and the shambles of the Occupation by German forces is described in poetic detail as well as the Vichy government that rules the Southern reaches of this desecrated country. Need another excuse to go to the bookstore this week? Aiding their efforts is Max de Lyon, the owner of a nightclub that caters to German officers, a Polish Jew who hides resistants in his club and puts Mathieu in touch with merchant marine toughs who spirit people out of the country for a fee. He detaches himself from his former life (except for his girl friend Jöelle and his dog Mariana), changes his name and joins the Resistance. The series is in rough chronological order so we get the sense of the espionage evolution of Paris from the Thirties to the early Occupation. The pace is leisurely and characters are authentic enough to be representations of actual people. A Hero of France by Furst, Alan Book The Fast Free Shipping. Overall however, I really enjoyed this installment in the series.I find it difficult to believe that this is the same Alan Furst who wrote Spies of the Balkans. Random House. And I’d better be, because I can be wrong only once.”As the novel progresses, most of the ordinary people Mathieu and his companions encounter are quietly anti-German, eager and willing to lend a hand. It is an easy read, however, another reviewer summed up my issues perfectly:I struggled with this book. France’s Jews began to be rounded up in the notorious It’s against this backdrop that Alan Furst has placed the 15th of his highly acclaimed thrillers set in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s.
Shot through with the author’s trademark fine writing, breathtaking suspense, and intense scenes of seduction and passion, Alan Furst’s A Hero of France is at once one of the finest novels written about the French Resistance and the most gripping novel yet by the living master of the spy thriller. Perhaps it adds to the atmosphere of the stories since they take place in Europe pre and post WWII. His contacts in the Resistance are few and he knows little about them. As historical dramas go, this one is quite good.I really liked this one. I’ve read several and particularly enjoyed this one set in Paris, 1941, early on during the German Occupation of Paris.
About a man in Paris early in the occupation by the Germans. Like many of its predecessors, this book is set in Europe during World War II. There is just something off/odd/different about the way he writes that always makes me think I am reading a translation. Mathieu-- not his real name-- operates a cell of the French Resistance concerned primarily with returning downed RAF pilots to Britain so that they can live to fight the Germans another day. And if we might not be Mathieu, then we’d at least hope to be like that railway engineer, giving the resistance fighter and his airman a ride into Paris, even if we knew we could be shot for it in the morning. Like Shane, Furst’s heroes tend to be loners — Marlboro men, we used to call them in the days of cigarette ads. Start by marking “A Hero of France (Night Soldiers, #14)” as Want to Read: I held my breath (ok, I did so metaphorically speaking because the scene was quite long) throughout the whole episode when Mathieu encounters a German officer in his connections’ house while his butcher’s van is parked outside. Aiding Mathieu as part of his covert network are Lisette, a seventeen-year-old student and courier; Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner; Chantal, a woman of class and confidence; Daniel, a Jewish teacher fueled by revenge; Joëlle, who falls in love with Mathieu; and Annemarie, a willful aristocrat with deep roots in France, and a desire to act.As the German military police heighten surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched by the Reich to destroy them all.Welcome back. When they slip away to a nearby locomotive, the engineer unquestioningly helps them. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST 1941. . Free shipping . There is just something off/odd/different about the way he writes that always makes me think I am reading a translation. They take on the burden of an entire city or country. The novels became shorter, the plots more perfunctory and episodic – as though the author was writing them while doing something else morI was once a fan of Alan Furst’s novels – the sequence right up to and including Dark Voyage are individual masterpieces of intrigue, suspense and menace set throughout Europe in a frightening period. Furst knows his Paris, and that knowledge, along with meticulous research (I read about the case when a real résistante worked her way out of the prison the same way Furst’s fictional Chantal did) turns every story into a delightful travel in time. $27.. On June 17, 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain issued orders to the French Army to cease … The heroes, unsung, that were made during that time as they made sacrifices and risked their lives to helpsave people and downed British airmen hiding from the Germans.Taut. This is Furst's (Midnight in Europe, 2014, etc.) We've got you covered with the buzziest new releases of the week. First weaves a complex storyline while maintaining a palpable tension. Mathieu leads one such Resistance cell, helping downed British airmen escape back to England.This suspenseful, fast-paced thriller by the author whom Vince Flynn calls “the most talented espionage novelist of our generation” captures this dangerous time as no one ever has before. Unlike most French people, who at this stage of the war“A HERO IN FRANCE” is a story set during the early months of the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. It wasn’t until 1943, when Germany began conscripting Frenchmen for military and factory or farm work, that larger numbers engaged in active rebellion. The good news for devotees of suspense novelist Alan Furst is that his latest book, A Hero of France, is a lot like his last nine or ten. This story takes place in 1941 Paris when Mathieu, a leader of the occupation, leads one Resistance cell by helping downed British airmen escape back to England.This was a thrilling novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied France by a great espionage thriller writer.