Furst, Alan Blood of Victory

Set in 1940, this evocative World War 2 thriller opens aboard the fictitious Bulgarian ore freighter SVISTOV, “pounding through the Black Sea swells, a long night’s journey from Odessa and bound for Istanbul.” Furst’s weary hero is an emigré Russian author (I.A. Serebin) who is reluctantly drawn into an espionage network attempting to thwart German control of Romania’s oil reserves. Included in Serebin’s Eastern European adventures is a perilous journey down the Danube from Belgrade into Romania aboard a Yugoslav tugboat.