Mission to Paris
By: Alan Furst
Format/Source: galley courtesy of Random House via NetGalley
Late summer, 1938. Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie. The Nazis know he’s coming—a secret bureau within the Reich has been waging political warfare against France, and for their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service run out of the American embassy. Mission to Paris is filled with heart-stopping tension, beautifully drawn scenes of romance, and extraordinarily alive characters: foreign assassins; a glamorous Russian actress-turned-spy; and the women in Stahl’s life. At the center of the novel is the city of Paris—its bistros, hotels grand and anonymous, and the Parisians, living every night as though it were their last. Alan Furst brings to life both a dark time in history and the passion of the human hearts that fought to survive it.
I’ve always been meaning to read Alan Furst’s books–historical-espionage fiction set during/around World War Two and the Cold War–but for some reason I just never really got around to it. So naturally I was pretty excited to learn that I was approved of a galley copy of this novel from the publishers through NetGalley.
This book is part of the Books on France Reading Challenge 2013 that I am participating in.