Under Occupation

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Alan Furst: Under Occupation (2020, Orion Publishing Group, Limited)

224 pages

English language

Published Sept. 12, 2020 by Orion Publishing Group, Limited.

ISBN:
978-1-4746-1056-8
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(1 review)

6 editions

Not great. Makes me wonder if I misjudged Furst's other books

I think I've read all 15 books in the Night Soldiers series. This one has some really distracting flaws:

  • not just similar, but identical sentences from when characters are introduced and then reintroduced later (which happens often in spy novels)

  • the hero is known by name to the Gestapo, and wanted for arrest, yet he lives in the same apartment the whole time and is even LISTED IN THE TELEPHONE BOOK. Nevertheless the bad guys tell a bounty hunter they will pay $ for the hero's capture, "if you can find him"

  • no twists or surprise betrayals

  • unlike the other Furst books, no honest acknowledgement of the ultimately small, almost negligible effect that local spies and resistors had on the outcome of the war

I don't know. Furst seems to have mailed this one in. He even made the protagonist a professional spy novelist.

Subjects

  • World war, 1939-1945, fiction
  • Fiction, espionage
  • Paris (france), fiction
  • Fiction, thrillers, general