Article: 'Spies of Warsaw' sets up reader to suspect everyone

The Spies of Warsaw

By Alan Furst Random House,

268 pages, $25

Alan Furst's The Spies of Warsaw is thick with a kind of foggy atmosphere that dances with nuance and oily tension. Each copy of the book should come with a leather trench coat and a forged passport.

Set largely in Warsaw on the cusp of World War II (1937-1938), the war's inevitability seems not unlike a runaway train. Furst ambitiously attempts to tell how the events two years subsequent to the book's events came to be, mainly the ease with which Germany invaded Poland (1939) and France (1940).

Furst's hero is the French military attache assigned to Warsaw, Jean-Francois Mercier, a twice-wounded colonel, and like so many of ...

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