Alan Furst is back and in fine form. Long time readers will recognize characters and places from previous novels and welcome new ones. Furst's pre-war Paris would not be complete without a visit to Papa Henninger's for some choucroute. And yes, the Bulgarian bullet hole is still there.

But there is a new thread as well. And that is that the evil of totalitarianism isn't just in wars and concentration camps -- the big things -- but in small things too. The way these regimes must attack human dignity and integrity one person at a time. This novel's main character, an Austrian born Hollywood actor of middling notoriety (think Paul Henried, Bogart's rival in Casablanca), soon discovers that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. And the goose step set in Germany discover that knocking out France and Poland will be easy compared to taking on Jack Warner and Hollywood! So, classic Furst. Good guys, bad guys, romantic, pre-war locales, spies, simps, traitors and femme fatales. And with every page that nagging feeling that the evil the author reveals didn't end in Berlin in 1945.