Night Soldiers

Khristo, a Bulgarian, is recruited, trained, and sent on assignment by the NKVD in the 1930s. What he and his comrades experience will forever change them.

This is the novel that started it all for Alan Furst. Since its initial publication in 1988, he has written 13 more, all with varying degrees of success, but all set in that 1933-1945 time period in Europe. Having picked up the series at The Polish Officer (book 3) and read all the way through to A Hero of France (book 14), I'm only now going back and reading the first two that I'd missed at the beginning.

This story, as I'm assuming the early novels in the series all share, is less focused on a central plot. It is very much so a group of characters, the things they did, and how it affected them. The Polish Officer had a similar structure, but was focused on one single character--and I think that made a world of difference. While Furst has an amazing grip on atmosphere, and he does put more emphasis on plot in the books in the middle of the series, character has never been his strong suit. This novel has too many of them doing too many things. In the end, it's difficult keeping them straight and even remembering what they had done earlier in the novel. Something definitely should've been done to make us more invested in what's going on with them, perhaps by making the novel longer and spending more time with the characters, or else by cutting some characters out. As it is, in addition to Khristo, we follow a couple of other NKVD recruits and a couple of Americans as well, none of which were handled very well.

That's not to say the novel is time wasted. Furst has an enjoyable style of writing, and the atmosphere is top notch. There is a load of information about the different conflicts at the time, as well as the different politicians and groups who were influential. It's also interesting to see how Furst presents the appeal of Soviet ideology in an unbiased manner, and then the eventual disillusionment through his characters' eyes. I'd say these aspects were actually the part of the novel that saved it from getting a 2-star review from me.

Without having read book 2 in the series yet, I'd heartily recommend anything that he has published in 1995 - 2006 (books 3 - 9), inclusive. After The Foreign Correspondent, it seems like he either isn't focused on his subject matter anymore, or he's become too comfortable and no longer thinks he needs to deliver a quality novel to his readers. This has been dreadfully apparent in his last three novels, published in 2012 - 2016. This book, though, is interesting to see where some of his recurring characters got their start. If you're already a fan, read it for a sense of completion. If you're a new reader, it gets better from here (but then it gets worse later).