Spies of the Balkans

Spies Of The Balkans is Alan Furst's 2010 espionage thriller in his "Night Soldiers" series of books. This one features Greek "senior police official" Consta Zannis in 1941 Greece, in the Balkans. He works out of Salonika, which until only a few decade before was a Turkish city. He solves tricky political problems and lives alone with his dog Melissa.

But he soon gets wrapped up in helping Jews escape the Nazis through an acquaintance, who sets up a kind of underground railroad from Berlin to Salonika and beyond. But he also has to worry about first the invading Italians, who want to show the Germans, ineffectually, how good they are by coming through Albania. He helps out at the front and then, when he comes back, Greece has to worry about the encroaching German might, as they annex by treaty or force, all their neighboring countries. Soon, he is no longer worried about Jewish flight, but rather his own skin.

I didn't really like this book as much as I did my previous Furst book, [b:The Spies of Warsaw|2294328|The Spies of Warsaw (Night Soldiers, #10)|Alan Furst|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320510011s/2294328.jpg|2300636]. This book is more about the strategic strokes of the war, of little people caught up in a crazy world, and not nearly the personal level found in Spies of Warsaw. Zannis was a good, honest character, but he really was just push along by events beyond his understanding or control, right down to the end of the book.

He also had some strange relationships, that came and went, with little or no explanation. And the motives for a couple of his missions were either missing or murky. But it did have the effortless prose that Furst is so good at, and he really gave you a feeling for the confusion at the start of World War 2 in this part of the world. In fact, it was a little too confusing sometimes! But if you like any of his espionage books, you will certainly like this one. And I am anxious to try some more.

A high-ranking police officer in Greece gets caught up in espionage and anti-Nazi activities in the months leading up to the invasion of Greece by Germany during World War II.

After reading most of Alan Furst's novels about spies in World War II, one has a sense of what to expect: great atmosphere, sex, espionage, history, intrigue, inevitability. It seems unusual, then, for Furst to fumble the novel when he's done it so well so many times before. That's not to say the novel is without merit--it does open and close well--but it seems lacking when compared to his others.

For starters, I think he tried to copy Kingdom of Shadows in the basic premise of the novel: living in the time period leading up to the inevitable invasion. And, like Kingdom of Shadows, it is also one of his least plot-intensive ones. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to capture the atmosphere, intrigue, and romance that makes him so renown. Indeed, the mission to Paris in the middle smacks of contrived conveniences and inconveniences, and the whole love affair is halfheartedly written. Even the dog seems forced in there just to add filler.

It's not a bad novel, but merely okay. Perhaps a reader new to Furst's writing would be better off seeking out The World at Night, Dark Voyage, Blood of Victory, or The Foreign Correspondent instead.