Blood of Victory: A Novel
I.A. Serebin, an émigré writer who heads the International Russian Union  and edits its literary magazine, is no stranger to war: "Two gangsters, one  neighborhood, they fight," he comments at a dinner party on a yacht in the  Istanbul harbor in the autumn of 1940. Istanbul, to which Serebin has come to  say good-bye to a dying friend, is a haven for spies, arms dealers, diplomats,  and intrigue. Like most of the author's protagonists, Serebin is a romantic, a  reluctant hero who tries to believe that war will not really change anything:  "Hold fast to life as it should be, the daily ritual, work, love, and then it  will be" is his credo. After Paris falls to the Germans, he realizes that is  impossible. When a French diplomat's wife, whom he met and bedded on the  freighter that brought him to Turkey, puts him in touch with a Hungarian spy  working with the British Secret Service, Serebin allows himself to be recruited  for a mission to disrupt the flow of oil from Romania's Ploesti fields to German  factories--something that has been tried by the British before, without success.  Alan Furst, a master stylist whose novels are peopled with characters who remain  in the reader's mind long after the last page is turned, evokes Istanbul's  smoky, spicy, shadowy atmosphere with the same authenticity he brings to the  settings of all his thrillers, most notably Paris. No one is better at  describing both place and players in the period just before and during World War  II; widely hailed as the successor to Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, Furst  proves in his gripping, compulsively readable seventh novel what a contender he  is for that title.--Jane Adams