Alan Furst is my favorite living writer, and I realized today, as I finished Mission to Paris, that part of why I love his books is because they channel Patrick Leigh Fermor through their pages - Fermor the genius of prewar Eastern Europe, evoking the gypsies, wealth, plainness, and strangeness of that time.

Furst's latest book is about a Hollywood leading man, Frederic Stahl, once Franz Stalka from Vienna, who travels to Paris in 1938 at Warner Brothers' request to film Après le Guerre. The Nazis see in Stahl a chance for a publicity coup, and they're onto him immediately. (The Nazis and the free press in France in 1938 offer striking parallels to big money buying influence in editorial pages in 2012, by the way. The German goal is to demoralize the French in 1938, to convince them not to fight - rapprochement, peace, "never again.")

The Nazis want to use Stahl - but as the man from the U.S. embassy tells him, if he angers them it will be far worse.

Missian to Paris is, like Furst's other World War II historical novels, a narcotic trip to another era. There are sensual pleasures along the way, food, sex, a castle in the snow, and a sweltering heat in sinister Morocco, but we travel there enveloped in a shroud of prescience, at the same time stumbling into fatalistic heroism along with the books' protagonists, nightmarish dread interspersed with the mundane and just getting on with life.

This may be Furst's best book - but I've thought that before, about previous tales. Absolutely recommended.