Alan Furst tries to capture the machinations of political subgroups underneath the bigger struggle of nazism versus communism versus capitalism. He seemed to be at his best when he was writing about the consolidation of Russian communism by Stalinists, as he did in Dark Soldiers. In this book he's writing instead about an expatriate Polish aristocrat working in the French underground. Here the discussions of politics take a back seat to a purer thriller. It's a good yarn, but not as good as some of the others in the series.

I passed this book on to Buck Mulligan on Christmas Day.