Name: Blood of Victory
Rating: 3.666666666666667 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780786249152

Alan Furst

Blood of Victory

Odessa -- city of Jewish gangsters, birthplace of Trotsky and ace spy Sidney Reilly, a mixture of chicken markets and Palladian architecture. The story begins on a Black Sea freighter in the winter of 1940. A.A. Serebin, poet and journalist, is on his way to Istanbul to effect the release of a former lover. The novel brings Serebin and his protector, police officer Ascher Levitch, into contact with a foreign espionage network centred in the Russian émigré communities of Paris, Berlin and Belgrade, as well as in Odessa itself. BLOOD OF VICTORY is a panoramic novel, moving between Istanbul, Bucharest, Paris, Sofia and the Black Sea coast, involving Turkish secret police, Russian chekhists, French aristocrats, Roumanian millionaires, Polish exiles and British spies. It is Alan Furst at his uniquely brilliant best. ¿Furst¿s ability to recreate the terrors of espionage is matchless¿ -- Robert Harris ¿Nothing can be like watching CASABLANCA for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years¿ -- Time

Another cleverly constructed thriller based in and around Central Europe in the period before the tide turned against Hitler. This one features a minor Russian poet - I.A. Serebin - and a supporting cast of resolute resistors, all trying to disrupt the flow of oil from the Romanian oil fields around Ploesti along the Danube, to be swallowed up by the thirsty German war machine. 

As ever, we’ll researched, and always entertaining. There are places common to a lot of Furst novels - including the infamous Table 14 at the Brasserie Heinineger in Paris, and the Danube itself, forever carving itself through the affairs of men. 

Jan Jackson

Another cleverly constructed thriller based in and around Central Europe in the period before the tide turned against Hitler. This one features a minor Russian poet - I.A. Serebin - and a supporting cast of resolute resistors, all trying to disrupt the flow of oil from the Romanian oil fields around Ploesti along the Danube, to be swallowed up by the thirsty German war machine. 

As ever, we’ll researched, and always entertaining. There are places common to a lot of Furst novels - including the infamous Table 14 at the Brasserie Heinineger in Paris, and the Danube itself, forever carving itself through the affairs of men. 

Blood of Victory

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