The fair white lady in Serebin’s stateroom is Marie-Galante Labonniere, wife of the diplomat just down the passageway. Serebin’s adventures open with a luscious coupling aboard a steamer on the Black Sea. Serebin, a writer who has slipped away from Stalin’s Great Terror in the nick of time and joined the raggedy remnants of the Russian intelligentsia in Paris. The reluctant, clever amateur (a Furst specialty) trying his hand at sabotage and spycraft is independently wealthy Russian émigré I.A.

Who else could toss off a joke about a Greta Garbo puppet drama in the middle of white-knuckled terror and make it work? The settings are Nazi-occupied Paris of late 1940 and the perpetually terrifying Romania, boiling in the fevers of civil war, fascist terror, and the Nazis next door.

To the intense pleasure of his rabid admirers, the master of the dark-little-between-the-wars thriller returns with another very, very good one.įurst ( Kingdom of Shadows, 2002, etc.) plots like a demon and writes better than an entire Iowa Workshop graduating class.

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