Reading Alan Furst's Night Soldiers series is a bit like reading Patrick O'Brian. Furst's first (heh) was Night Soldiers, a massive epic of war and espionage, probably the best novel about spies in the Second World War you're likely to read. But in many ways it set the parameters for his subsequent works, while Red Gold set the template. None of the other books have been as epic - except inasmuch as anything touched by the Second World War is touched by the epic - tighter, briefer, sharper, more focused. Few of them go past 1941 or '42 in timeframe. At first this can seem disappointing and the books begin to seem samey and repetitive. But, like O'Brian, they are only samey and repetitive in terms of theme and format. The broad strokes of the War are, to us, predetermined. Within those strokes wind the lives of the men and women in the secret, murky world of espionage. Describing these lives is what Furst excels at, and he has perfected that style and format. If Night Soldiers was his Epic, these are his sonnets.

Our setting is Salonika, 1940. Our slightly shabby, vaguely disreputable, incurably romantic hero is Consta Zannis, a police officer responsible for peacefully resolving knotty political difficulties. He becomes involved in a secret route for Jews and dissidents fleeing Berlin. Time, of course, is running out, and the question is how long the route can be kept open, and whether it can survive the attentions of the British Secret Service.

Drenched in atmosphere, heroism and romanticism, with doom coming down on all sides and the shady, shadowy world of criminals and spies and secret lovers intermingling, this is thrilling, tragic, marvelous stuff. A kind of escapism, sure, but of such elegance and subtlety and the sense of intelligent people making small gestures in the face of unstoppable evil, it always leaves you wanting more.