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 … 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.
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I wanted to take a trip to Paris and my bookshelves weren’t giving me many unread options. How I got this book, from 2012, I have no idea; I’d never read Furst, but I’m hooked now. An American actor who is Viennese by birth travels to Paris in 1938 to make a movie, and finds himself the target of both overt and covert forces who want to co-opt him …
Furst’s era of writing is pre and early World War II. He has written several books about different locales with a theme running through them of semi-heroes who worked against the Nazis before and during the War. I thought I had read them all but I just found one I had missed and I can’t wait to start it.
His books about WWII espionage are well written and very believable.
Mission to Paris is an Alan Furst production, which should, by now, tell you everything you need to know about it: interwar European intrigue, a morally compromised milieu, atmospheric settings sketched with the lightest touch, buckets of research made to look effortless. His novels take place in a world in which cocktail parties and dinners …
I loved this book except, the author tore a page out of Patricia Cornwell’s style. I felt the ending could have been more satisfying. It left me wanting to know a little more about the characters once they reached the U.S.
First is the best author today writing about the WWII era telling lesser known stories and creating the atmosphere.
Love this author. After I read the first in the series I read all of them sequentially.
Alan Furst is always great – humane and moving while being suspenseful and historically vivid.