num_pages: 268
description: Greece 1940. Not sunny vacation Greece: northern Greece Macedonian Greece Balkan Greece--the city of Salonika. In that ancient port with its wharves and warehouses dark lanes and Turkish mansions brothels and tavernas 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 suffered by the Nazis who have conquered most of Europe. But Adolf Hitler cannot tolerate such freedom; the invasion is coming it's only a matter of time and the people of Salonika can only watch and wait.At the center of this drama is Costa Zannis a senior police official head of an office that handles special political cases. As war approaches the spies begin to circle from the Turkish legation to the German secret service. There's a British travel writer a Bulgarian undertaker and more. Costa Zannis must deal with them all. And he is soon in the game securing an escape route--from Berlin to Salonika and then to a tenuous safety in Turkey a route protected by German lawyers Balkan detectives and Hungarian gangsters. And hunted by the Gestapo.Meanwhile as war threatens the erotic life of the city grows passionate. For Zannis that means a British expatriate who owns the local ballet academy a woman from the dark side of Salonika society and the wife of a local shipping magnate.Declared an incomparable expert at his game by The New York Times Alan Furst outdoes even his own finest novels in this thrilling new book. With extraordinary authenticity a superb cast of characters and heart-stopping tension as it moves from Salonika to Paris to Berlin and back Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to right--in many small ways--the world's evil.
language: English
title: Spies of the Balkans
publisher: Random House