Spies of the Balkans is the eleventh literary fiction book in the Night Soldiers series by author Alan Furst.
Greece, 1940. Greece sunless holiday: northern Greece, Macedonian Greece, Balkan Greece, the city of Salonika. In that quaint harbour, with its wharfs and warehouses, dark streets and Turkish villas, brothels and taverns, a tense political drama is unfolding. On the northern border, the Greek army stopped Mussolini’s invasion, driving his divisions back to Albania, the first defeat of the Nazis, who had conquered most of Europe. But Adolf Hitler could not stand such freedom; the invasion is coming; It was only a matter of time and the people of Salonika could only watch and wait.

At the center of this film is Costa Zannis, a high-ranking police official who heads an office that handles special political cases. As war approached, spies began to circle, from the Turkish corps to the German secret service. There’s a British travel writer, someone who definitely takes Bulgarian funerals, and so on.

Costa Zannis has to deal with it all. And soon he’s in the game, there’s bound to be an escape route from Berlin to Salonika, and then to a fragile safe in Turkey, a route guarded by the German lawyer, detective the Balkans and the Hungarian gang. And hunted by the Gestapo.

As war threatens, the city’s rebellious life turns hectic. For Zannis, that means being an expatriate Englishman who owns the local ballet academy, a woman from the Dark Side of Salonika society and the wife of a local shipping magnate.

Billed by The New York Times as a one-of-a-kind expert at his game, Alan Furst surpasses even his own best novels in this thrilling new book. With extraordinary realism, great cast of characters, and heart-stopping tension as it travels from Salonika to Paris to Berlin and back, Spies of the Balkans is a brilliant novel about a man who ventures into the world. risk everything to achieve the right – in many small ways – of the world.

Furst is a brilliant writer and he brings times, places and people that no longer exist in this modern world with clarity second to none. This book and his other recent books are not quite as good as his earlier books. The heroes and heroines of the previous books are minor players in the events depicted and it’s the story of them trying to survive the situations that force them and life. Their survival to the end of the book is enough. The more recent books seem to make their heroes more important in the grand scheme of things, and their reward is a more positive ending.

An excellent novel that weaves a gripping tale of the dark days as the Balkans awaited the Nazi invasion. It makes you want to see more of Costa Zannis – and even Hauptsturmfuhrer Hauser, God help me!

• Spies of the Balkans

• By: Alan Furst
• Narrated by: Daniel Gerroll

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