This legendary figure of immense power has selected him to head a special bureau whose duties are so politically sensitive that it goes unnamed. His personal qualities - a rare disinterest in bribes, an unfailing discretion and a wide-ranging competence - have attracted the notice and patronage of the city's 80-year-old police commissioner, Vangelis. Furst's engaging protagonist is a "senior official" of the Salonika police, Constantine (Costa) Zannis. The action occurs over the crucial seven-month period between late 1940 and the Nazi invasion of Greece in the spring of 1941. The novel is set primarily in the northeastern Greek city of Salonika, an ancient and famously polyglot place only recently returned to Athens' sovereignty by the second Balkan War. Alan Furst's Spies of the Balkans is the 11th in a kind of series - all set in Europe during what Auden called that "low dishonest decade" that concluded with the onset of the Second World War.
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