Young Bulgarian fisherman Khristo Stoianev, having watched his brother be kicked to death by Fascist troops in 1934, is recruited as a spy by the Soviets and becomes part of a brotherhood that sustains him through danger in Spain, Paris, Prague, and throughout Europe in the years before World War II.

In the opening days of World War II, Captain Alexander de Milja, a member of the Polish resistance movement, is given the job of smuggling the national gold reserve to the exiled government.

As the German occupation of France tightens, Jean Casson finds himself hiding from the Gestapo and running guns to combat units of the French Communist party.

Russian writer I.A. Serebin arrives in Istanbul in November, 1940, where he is recruited for an operation run by Count Janos Polanyi, a Hungarian master spy now working for the British secret service.

"From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls “America’s preeminent spy novelist,” comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom–the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts’ passion to fight in the war against tyranny. By 1938, hundreds...

Costa Zannis, a senior police officer who deals with special political cases, tries to secure an escape route from Berlin to the Greek port city of Salonika and then into Turkey while the Nazis of World War II are busy conquering the rest of Europe in 1940, but his task is complicated by spies from the Turkish legation and the German secret service and Zannis becomes a target for the Gestapo.

"The City of Light, occupied by the Nazis, is dark and silent at night. Streetlamps are painted blue and apartment windows draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the Germans. But when the clouds part, the silvery moonlight defies authority, and so does a leader of the French Resistance, known as Mathieu. In Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined to take...