THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

Alan Furst's smoky "noir" novels are addictive, and no less are George Guidall's smoke-and-gravel performances of them. This one is set, as Furst's books often are, in the last years of the 1930s, as Europe feels the moral climate darken and the reader knows what deluge is coming. Carlo Weisz, half-Slavic, half-Italian, and wholly anti-Fascist, is a Reuters correspondent. When the editor of an underground Italian resistance paper is murdered, Carlo is half-drawn, half-pressured into taking over. Furst's characters are shape-shifting and world-weary, resigned to a climate full of shadows. Guidall's voice is older than that of the main characters but suits the material perfectly, since Furst's is a world in which no one is young, except perhaps Carlo's appealing German lover in Berlin. B.G. 2007 Audies Award Finalist © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/ MAY 07]