Last week I was grocery shopping on 37th
Avenue . Occasionally, there will be a guy with a
thick European accent selling used books outside the Met supermarket. His stock
is usually crap, spread out over several tables. Pulpy romances, self-help
lessons, forgotten lowest-common-denominator best-sellers of decades ago,
coloring books, action-oriented sci-fi. He only charges $1 or 50 cents, but
even at those cheap prices, there’s never anything I want. This time I actually
found something interesting—Alan Furst’s Kingdom of Shadows, a spy novel
set in 1938 Paris . The hero, Nicky
Morath, a former cavalry officer with the Hungarian army, undergoes numerous
adventures smuggling refugees out of Nazi-occupied countries, obtaining fake
passports, raising covert funds for the resistance, providing mistresses for
German officers (everything has a price in Paris ).
