I learned more about Stalin and World War II from this book than I ever learned from any history class.

Andre Szara is a respected Russian journalist working for Pravda, occasionally doing a little favor for the State, when suddenly, he finds himself involved in a political killing. He is handed a luggage ticket retrieved from the body, and directed to redeem a piece of luggage stowed away in a Prague train station. Under a false bottom in an old suitcase, he finds a case file, detailing a mysterious sombody’s years of snitch work for the Okhrana, the Tzar's secret police. The somebody turns out to be Stalin himself. An underground force within Soviet intelligence wants Szara to write the story, exposing the Soviet leader's traitorous criminal background--essentially, asking Szara to commit suicide. And then, history convulses, priorities change, and Stalin is needed to lead the fight against Hitler.

A survivor of pogroms, the Russian Pale, and Stalin's purges, Szara is wry and witty, dashing and romantic, cynical and softhearted. I’ve read all of Mr. Furst’s books, and Szara is the most solidly real of all his heroes. You bob your head along with his observations, you ache when he aches, you fear for his life. You understand what it feels like to lose all hope, and what it means to fall in love, when you thought there was nothing left inside of you.

With the effortless grace of his language, his amazing grasp of history, and an astounding vocabulary of period detail, Furst conjures it all to quivering life. When you read this book, you will know how it feels to be hunted by the NKVD, what it is like to be a Jew in Berlin on Kristallnacht, how to react if a Gestapo officer leans over to look at you, and of course, how to run an agent. You will feel those German warplanes roar down over your head before they drop their payloads. You are in that line of Polish refugees, trudging away from both sides as fast as you can. It’s you, waiting with increasing desperation for some country, any country, to give you a visa so that you can get away from bad people who want to kill you. Most effectively, he recreates what it must have felt like to be a Jew in an increasingly unfriendly world.

I love all of Alan Furst's books. But Dark Star is my favorite.