It skips from scene to scene with the briefest of details and development, with cardboard thin motivations and what felt like multiple sins in the espionage game. The book reads like a rough first draft, the sort where you get a lot of ideas down and you’ll decide later which ones to more fully explore. He leads an interesting life and could have been fleshed out into something truly special, but alas, we move so rapidly that we only get snippets of characters. It feels like we’re skimming along the surface when we dive into this story of French spy novelist (and eager resistance fighter) Paul Ricard. It’s a Christmas tree without the ornaments.
Furst is so much better than this, and at times I even thought someone else tried to poorly mimic his style, some middling student swiped his notes and gave it a shot. His latest entry into the iconic Night Soliders series is, to my heartbreaking disappointment, nowhere near as good as his other books. There are only two books here that disappointed me, while the rest range from very solid to brilliant, and I hope this list inspires you to give the series a chance.īelow are my rankings by preference, but if you wish to read the series in chronological publication order, I’ll list that at the end. They’re people from all walks of life, and they all start out fearful of the Nazi regime and are unsure of what they can do against Hitler’s minions, but each finds a way to help, somehow. Some main characters are Polish army officers, Italian newspaper reporters, Russian writers, Greek detectives, French film producers, Hungarian émigrés, etc. Furst gives us more of a grassroots perspective of Europe’s turmoil in that time. One aspect I appreciate most about the series is that the main characters are not your typical British or American WWII hero archetypes-spies, soldiers, or otherwise.
Alan Furst and his “Night Soldiers” books focus on the European underground résistance against the Nazis between the years of (give or take) 19, and they have been an absolute pleasure to read and re-read since I discovered him around 2012.
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