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Outstanding
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Booklist Bill Ott
As always with Furst, setting conveys both mood and meaning; here, it's a series of neutral or semineutral ports of call--Tangier, Algeciras, Lisbon--that provides the shadows and infuses the action with that ambiguous uncertainty of motive in which Furst's people thrive. [July 2004, p.1798]
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Richard Dyer
Repeatedly some unexpected, unpredictable, absurdist, and thoroughly convincing detail sets the dark atmosphere ashimmer.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph David Robson
It is vintage Furst, with a gripping plot and a galaxy of well-drawn characters.
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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Lisa Jennifer Selzman
Anchored by a suspenseful plot, a slew of particularly well-articulated major and minor characters acquire a depth not commonly found in fact-action reads.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Instead of a grandly plotted crusade, this war is an on-the-fly, jerry-rigged affair, making the heroism all the more astonishing. Realistic but still grand: a gripping odyssey of ordinary men in extraordinary times.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
The characters who come aboard and into the captain's life...are sketched with concise brilliance.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Alan Cheuse
The irresistible combination of DeHaan, the wartime lore of the sea, and the masterly way that Furst creates suspense, whether in battle or in ports of call, is a real victory. For all you aficionados of World War II thrillers, summer won't be over until you read this one.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
Mr. Furst has both a novelist's imagination and a historian's antennae for the nuances of unsteady World War II allegiances...The streamlined clarity with which Dark Voyage pulls all this together is extraordinary.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
Positively bristles with plot, characters AND atmosphere.
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Favorable
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The Guardian M John Harrison
Furst's characters live in interesting times. As a consequence, this, the eighth of his addictive, beautifully humane novels, reflects the narrative curve of history, the biographical curves of real lives.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Charles Taylor
The denouement of Dark Voyage is both breathless and utterly relaxed, not so pell-mell that Furst can't stop to be amused at the ironies of shifting alliances. If he ever breaks a sweat, it doesn't show.
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Favorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Donna Bowman
[Furst] portrays the routine of shipboard life, the deference and camaraderie of the multinational crew, and the tension of boarding parties on the high seas with the facility and ease of Patrick O'Brien.
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Favorable
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LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard
The narrative, which takes DeHaan's ship from Crete to the northern reaches of the Baltic, proceeds at a leisurely pace -- this is the kind of thriller that, counterintuitively, ought to be read slowly.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Barbara Conaty
With profound understanding of the historic panorama, Furst subtly evokes the emotional and mental highs that resided at that time, even within the most ordinary and anonymous of citizens. [July 2004, p.69]
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Eugen Weber
DeHaan inveigles as he goes, and Furst ensnares his readers. As usual.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Randy Michael Signor
What separates the over-the-top work of such popular storytellers as Tom Clancy and the quieter masters such as Furst, John le Carre and Robert Littell, is that Furst in particular is a master of understatement, in both language and action. The action in Dark Voyage is matter-of-fact, unexpected, and presented with a degree of confusion and uncertainty.
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Furst seems to be trying to capture the incidental nature of real experience with his meandering travelogue of a plot; but it's an unrewarding slog for the reader. Furst never grabs a story line and commits.
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Unfavorable
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The Economist
With the exception of the Dutch captain of the freighter, the reader of Dark Voyage is not given enough to care much about where any of the characters came from, nor where they are going to.
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Unfavorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Andrew Pyper
At its best, Furst's prose is lean as ostrich tenderloin, but its jump cuts, multiple sentence fragments and frequent use of italics to reveal the tickertape of characters' inner thoughts can be distracting at times, if not downright confusing.
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