Spies of the Balkans » (Unabridged)

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.

"Furst's books are like Chopin's nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal.

One does not so much read them as fall under their spell."

--Los Angeles Times, on The Spies of Warsaw

Greece, 1940. Not sunny vacation Greece: northern Greece, Macedonian Greece, Balkan Greece--the city of Salonika. In that ancient port, with its wharves and brothels, dark alleys and Turkish mansions, a tense political drama is being played out. On the northern border, the Greek army has blocked Mussolini's invasion, pushing his divisions back to Albania--the first defeat for an ally of the Nazis, who have conquered most of Europe. But Adolf Hitler will not tolerate such defiance: in the spring he will invade the Balkans, and the people of Salonika can only watch and wait.

At the center of this drama is Constantine "Costa" Zannis, a senior police official, head of an office that handles special "political" cases. As war approaches, the...

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

In 1939 Greece's prime minister, Gen. Ioannis Metaxas, said that "the old Europe would end when the swastika flew over the Acropolis." The Nazi flag did not rise over the Acropolis until April 1941. Spies of the Balkans is about the time in between, when people like Zannis were forced to get their bearings in an increasingly hostile world and to become rescuers to those fleeing more perilous places. Mr. Furst's gift for exquisite calibration transports the reader back to a realm where characters like Zannis could determine the limits of their authority only by testing it to the extreme.