Dark Star, by Alan Furst; In this story of Europe in the late thirties, Alan Furst portrays a grim world but one not without humanity. I haven't read John le Carre in a long time, but I remember his novels being a lot bleaker, even cynical. Furst is a first rate writer, not just cranking out thrillers. Every so often, a truly luminous passage appears like this one talking about a poem by Alexander Blok "The Scythians": " He [Szara] would never the mysteries that these two peoples, the Russians and the Germans, shared between them. Blok had tried, as only a poet could [here it comes!]applying images, the inexplicable chemistry at the borders of language." Isn't that marvelous; the inexplicable chemistry at the borders of language.