A Hero of France

By Alan Furst

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the bestselling master espionage writer, hailed by Vince Flynn as "the best in the business," comes a riveting novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST 1941. The City of Light is dark and silent at night. But in Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined to take down the occupying forces of Adolf Hitler. Mathieu, a leader of the French Resistance, leads one such cell, helping downed British airmen escape back to England. Alan Furst's suspenseful, fast-paced thriller captures this dangerous time as no one ever has before. He brings Paris and occupied France to life, along with courageous citizens who outmaneuver collaborators, informers, blackmailers, and spies, risking everything to fulfill perilous clandestine missions. Aiding Mathieu as part of his covert network are Lisette, a seventeen-year-old student and courier; Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner; Chantal, a woman of class and confidence; Daniel, a Jewish teacher fueled by revenge; Jo lle, who falls in love with Mathieu; and Annemarie, a willful aristocrat with deep roots in France, and a desire to act. As the German military police heighten surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched by the Reich to destroy them all. Shot through with the author's trademark fine writing, breathtaking suspense, and intense scenes of seduction and passion, Alan Furst's A Hero of France is at once one of the finest novels written about the French Resistance and the most gripping novel yet by the living master of the spy thriller.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812986466
• ISBN13: 9780812986464
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Nitpicking???

I've read the first three of the Night Soldiers series and some others out of order, like this one. As I was reading on page 9 of this novel, something stopped me at that page. The Wermacht never had any "quad-mounted fifty-calibre machine guns". The US Army did, primarily as an Air Defense weapon; and used horizontally, a murderous anti-personnel weapon against Wermact troops and soft-skinned vehicles. The only equivalent would've been the MG131, a 13mm projectile heavy machine gun used primarily by the Luftwaffe and not used by the Wermacht till 1945. They also used the MG151, but their preference after the MG34 & MG42, would've been their 20mm cannon. The Anerican Browning M2 50 cal. was never in use by the Wermacht. A simple Google search would've put that error on 'the Spike'.