by Alan Furst
Part of Night Soldiers, book 9
First published 2007
Carlo Weisz works as a Reuters correspondent in 1938, but his life changes when fascist agents murder the editor of Liberazione, a secret Italian resistance newspaper in Paris. Weisz returns from covering the Spanish Civil War to discover he must take over the dangerous role. The paper operates among hundreds of Italian intellectuals who fled Mussolini's regime and now fight tyranny with typewriters, smuggling news back to Italy. Weisz finds himself hunted by three intelligence services: the French Sûreté, Mussolini's OVRA secret police, and British agents. Each wants to use him as a pawn in Europe's gathering storm. His world includes Colonel Ferrara, an army officer fighting a doomed cause in Spain, Arturo Salamone, who leads the Paris resistance cell, and Christa von Schirren, a woman running her own underground operation in Berlin who becomes central to Weisz's life. The story moves between elegant hotel bars and railway cars, Spanish mountains and Berlin's shadowy streets, as ordinary people risk everything for freedom.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, espionage, political-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, fast-paced, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: Berlin, France, Italy, Paris, Spain
Period: 1938
273 pages · Paperback · Random House Publishing Group
Content warnings: violence