Furst's characters are also well-drawn, if rather familiar from the war and espionage novelists of years past: the world-weary Russian spymaster, drinking away his fear; the naive American drawn into a dark world beyond her ken; the jolly Eastern European emigre with a well-worn grudge and a secret plan for revenge. Furst falters somewhat in the later portions of the novel, after Khristo has fled Spain, languished in a Paris jail and joined up with the French Resistance in the struggle against the German Occupation. Here Furst seems to tread water a bit, in particular with the character of an American counterpart to Khristo, similarly drawn into the struggle almost by accident. Things pick up again toward the end, as a last mission draws Khristo — now in the service of the OSS — further east, back toward his home, across war-torn Europe.

I brought all sorts of magazines and journal articles along with me on the flight, in case I didn't get into Night Soldiers. I needn't have worried — I read almost continuously for six hours, and then stayed up a couple of nights to polish it off. On the way home, I devoured another very good Furst thriller, The World at Night, which follows the travails of a French filmmaker in the months following the German conquest of Paris. Both novels tell the sort of untellable stories that one can only imagine from the obituary pages, as the last survivors of those years silently pass away. And they tell those stories very well, combining genuine literary talent with a gift for drama and suspense — if the mainstream thriller moves to meet Furst halfway, airport bookstores will be a much better place.