THR's Beach Read of the Week: 'Mission To Paris' by Alan Furst

Mission to Paris, master spy novelist Alan Furst's newest historical thriller about an actor caught up in the cloak-and-dagger spy games of pre-World War II Europe, arrives in stores just in time for holiday beach reading.

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Set in France in the years leading up to Germany's 1940 invasion, the novel follows carefree Austrian-born Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl on his way to Paris to make a film for Paramount France. The Nazis want him to come back to Berlin to promote the Reich by attending a film festival. What they don’t know, however, is that Stahl is a part of an informal spy service run out of the American embassy in Paris. He returns to Germany and gets caught up in a game of espionage that may cost him his life. As Stahl rushes to finish the movie, the Nazis close in on him, trying to snare him before he can escape to America.

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Mission to Parisis vintage Furst, vividly recreating pre-war Europe and livening up the novel with cast of secondary characters that includes Hungarian royalty, a beautiful Soviet spy and cruel Nazi assassins.

The book is the New York native’s twelfth spy novel  in his Night Soldiers series, dating back to 1988 when he was an American expatriate in Paris. It debuted in the number two spot on the New York Times’ Hardcover Fiction best-seller list.

His first book to appear on the New York Times list was Kingdom of Shadows in 2000.  The ninth Night Soldiers novel, The Spies of Warsaw, is currently being made into a BBC series to appear this fall.