The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst

Furst is master of the historical spy novel.  This one is set in pre-war Warsaw where Jean-Francois Mercier de Boutillon is an attache with the French Embassy and a secret spy master.

The operations that Mercier is asked to carry out are all in an effort by the anti-Petain forces in the French miliary to prove that the Germans plan to move against France by bringing tanks across Belgium.  He watches tank war games in the woods of southern Germany, enlists a German resistance member to get documents that end up supporting the German command's intentions, and helps an old-guard Russian spy couple to defect.  In the mean time, he finds his true love, Anna, an attorney in Warsaw.

The story may be fiction, but the history is accurate.  It is frustrating to see how the French high command was coopted by those who did not want to believe what they could see with their own eyes, or secretly wanted an alliance with Hitler against Russia.  France let the events that led to World War II unfold with little resistance until it was too late.

Furst is an outstanding espionage writer, and I look forward to both his future work and to picking up some of his previous works.

Liz Nichols

"The Broker" by John Grisham

I have never been a heavy Grisham reader. I could never get into the mindset of his characters. "The Broker" is no different in that I find it hard to really feel sympathetic to the main character, "The Broker," Joel Backman. Backman was pardoned by an outgoing president under questionable circumstances. He had been a party to an abortive sale of surveillance satellite control secrets which got the Pakestani programmers who designed the program killed, and anyone who knew about the program assassinated as well. Backman found it expedient to plead guilty rather than to be next on the hit list.

The CIA set him up to be gunned down when it lobbied the President for the pardon, then took Backman into the Witness Protection Program in Bologna, Italy only to abandon him to would-be assassins from Israel, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia just for the sport of finding out who desired to get at the still-missing satellite program.

The book plods a bit during the long sequences when Backman in the disguise of a Canadian-Italian business man, Marco Lazzeri, is trying to learn Italian. The travelogue about northern Italy that is part and parcel of the book, however, is interesting and carries one along as the main character tries to find a way out of his mess.

With the help of a beautiful Italian tutor and travel guide, he manages to save his skin, at least for the time-being.

I liked the book; I just wish I liked the main character better.

Liz Nichols