Blood of Victory » (~)

When it comes to spy novels, no one is more erudite or elegant than Alan Furst, whose novels -- all set in the European theater of World War II are rich with both historical fact and brilliantly imagined circumstances.

In 1939, as the armies of Europe mobilized for war, the British secret services undertook operations to impede the exportation of Roumanian oil to Germany. They failed.

Then, in the autumn of 1940, they tried again.

The New Yorker

Furst's "Kingdom of Shadows" was a sprawling, somewhat fogbound work that seemed primarily concerned with demonstrating the author's virtuosic ability to describe scenes of espionage in European capitals. Although some of that novel's minor characters resurface here, "Blood of Victory" is a far more focussed thriller that revolves around a plan to disrupt the flow of Romanian oil to the Third Reich. As usual, Furst adheres strictly to the rules of the genre: the protagonist, a Russian expatriate writer, is seduced into service both by the prospect of heroism and by a mysterious Frenchwoman, and embarks on a globe-trotting, spy-versus-spy adventure. But his debts to convention work in his favor. Densely atmospheric and genuinely romantic, the novel is most reminiscent of the Hollywood films of the forties, when moral choices were rendered not in black-and-white but in smoky shades of gray.