© Random House The Polish Officer by Alan Furst Random House, 1995 (paperback edition pictured published 2001) (From the publisher) September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is a military cartographer before being recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal. The Polish Officer was based on a photograph, taken during the Polish rising in Warsaw in 1944. At the end of an alley, a young man in a white shirt holds a rifle and peers cautiously out onto the street. Behind him three young men are kneeling. "When I first saw the photograph, it meant very little. Then, months later, I realized what the kneeling men were doing—waiting for the man in the white shirt to be killed or wounded, then it would be time for the next man in line to use the rifle." © Random House Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst Random House, 2000 (From the publisher) In spymaster Alan Furst's most electrifying thriller to date, Hungarian aristocrat Nicholas Morath—a hugely charismatic hero—becomes embroiled in a daring and perilous effort to halt the Nazi war machine in eastern Europe. (from Amazon.com) Kingdom of Shadows is set in Paris during 1938 and 1939. It is unclear at that time what the fate of Hungary will be if Hitler has his way, but a small group of expatriates would like to insure that events turn out in their country's favor. Nicholas Morath is an Hungarian aristocrat who fought bravely in the Great War. He is now part owner of an advertising agency in Paris, while his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, is a minor diplomat stationed in Paris. Polanyi calls on Nicholas to take part in missions against the Hungarian Fascists: carrying letters or bringing individuals back across the border in the course of his business trips. As Nicholas's dinner parties, business deals, and dalliances with his mistress start to take a back seat to the escalating crisis in Europe, his tasks become more complicated, dangerous, and bewildering to him. He knows far less than the reader, who understands that his actions will have far-reaching consequences even beyond the fate of Hungary. Nicholas just does what he can without the luxury of historic hindsight. About the author © Bill Hayward In the course of his six novels, Alan Furst has been praised in reviews from The New York Times to USA Today to Time. In the U.K. he is a national nest seller. His novels, historical spy fiction, take place in the Europe of the 1930s and '40s, a historical period no other American novelist covers to the critical acclaim that Frust has achieved. Often compared to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, Furst is a master of the spy thriller and one of the great war novelists of our time. He is the author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, and The World at Night. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.