This was my first Furst novel, and it just made me hungry for more. His characters are incredibly believable (how’s that for an oxymoron), and his descriptions vivid.

His protagonist, a Frenchman named Jean Cason, is not some super-hero, but an ordinary guy caught up in extraordinary circumstances – Paris during the German occupation in WWII. He is an unlikely hero, who makes fatal mistakes, fumbles, gets nervous, and all the other things all of us would do in his shoes. But for this you like him all the more.

Well worth the read. Some of the best fiction I’ve read in quite a while.