Dark Days on the Continent

There is a certain sort of reader who craves a good thriller but is more concerned with atmosphere and character than with plot. Not for him are the fat, garish paperbacks about gun-toting heroes racing against time to avert an assassination, a nuclear detonation, or some other catastrophe, in clunky prose laden with clichés. Better if the story is set in another time and place, offering a welcome escape from wearisome, too-familiar headlines. Better still if it’s slim and gracefully written, offering a few hours of guilt-free pleasure while imparting historical insights along the way.

Therefore it is a pleasure to recommend the gripping and suspenseful A Hero of France, the 14th in a series of spy novels by Alan Furst set in the 1930s and ’40s. Like all of them, it is intensely atmospheric, transporting the reader to a Paris redolent of cigarette smoke, succulent food, and romance in the face of danger. The heavy tread of German jackboots echoes in the cobbled streets, and Parisians admonish one another, regarding their occupiers, “You must not meet their eyes.”