So far, I've been reading Furst's spy books backwards, the most recent ('Spies of the Balkans') first. The lovely thing about his concept is that you might start or end anywhere. The books are only connected by time and place--the 30s and 40s in Europe. The only element of continuity is an obligatory visit to the Brasserie Heiniger in Paris, where gangsters, high society and gestapo officers mingle.

'Night Soldiers' is the first book in this collection of eleven books published over the last twenty-two years. It serves as the origin story for the bullet hole in the mirrored walls of the Brasserie Heiniger, and is bigger and deeper than the final three books, and perhaps not quite as slick.

That made for a nice change of pace as Furst, inventing the wheel as it were, is not quite as bound to his formula, although 'Night Soldiers' does have elements of that formula, and is no less polished or engaging than the other books I have read.

Indeed, the more epic scope of 'Night Soldiers' lets Furst traverse Europe west from Spain to its eastern edge in Moscow. The connecting thread is the Danube, a metaphorical aorta for the book's hero, born a Bulgarian peasant and ending up a retired double agent in New York. Furst is particularly gifted at conveying a visceral sense of the backwaters of Eastern Europe--aromas, flavors, colors, flesh, bone, and blood--and Khristo Stoianev's journey downstream on the Danube from Hungary to the Black Sea, as Germany falls, shows off the author's talent to great advantage in the last section of 'Night Soldiers.'

But there is much more. Trained by the Russians, Stoianev fights for them in the doomed Spanish Civil War, waits tables at the brasserie before Paris is occupied, and then fights with the French Resistance under an undercover OSS officer, before the voyage on the Danube. Like all of Furst's unlikely heroes, he's got an existential moral code. The pervasive efforts of Stalin's cruel bureaucrats fail to crush Khristo Stoianev's spirit, or to keep him from finding love.