Alan Furst

November, 1940. I.A. Serebin, a writer from Odessa and former decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, is on his way to Istanbul following a cryptic letter from a former lover.

Ostensibly there on official business for the International Russian Union, an emigre organisation based in Paris, he is drawn into a clandestine world of international spies and political players. With war in Europe drawing nearer, Serebin is recruited by the British secret services - his mission to stop the export of Romanian oil to Germany.

In a race against time, Serebin's journey will take him from the glittering salons of Paris to the back alleys of Bucharest and the Black Sea ports, in a covert operation to staunch the flow of oil, the precious 'blood of victory'.

For Eric DeHaan, captain of the Dutch tramp freighter Noordenam, life at sea has always been his great, but not his only, love affair. Recruited by Dutch navel intelligence while in the port of Tangier, DeHaan steers his ship, disguised as a neutral Spanish freighter, through a series of secret missions for British naval interests.

Andre Szara is a journalist working for Pravda in 1937 but with war imminent, he is co-opted to join the Soviet secret intelligence agency. When he is sent to retrieve a battered briefcase he is drawn into ever more complex intrigues.

Nicholas Morath works in a Paris advertising agency. In 1938, with the growth of fascism, Nicholas undertakes several missions for his uncle, a diplomat, as part of a complex plan to oppose the Nazis in eastern Europe.

During the Occupation of France film producer and spy Jean Casson was forced to flee Paris. Now, with a new identity, he is back, determined to stay out of trouble. As the war drags on he inevitably drifts back into the dangerous world of resistance and espionage.

Costa Zannis is the dashing chief detective of Salonika in 1940. He becomes involved in an audacious plot - smuggling Jews to Istanbul, through the back door of Europe. The British hear he can penetrate the continent's closed borders, and he is soon embroiled in the resistance, and in a reckless love affair that could jeopardise everything.

This is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists. They are the army officer who fights for a lost cause in Spain, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris, and the woman who becomes the love of Weisz's life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin.

War is coming to Europe, French and German operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, is drawn in to a world of abduction, betrayal and intrigue in Warsaw.