Toby Barlow’s sophomore novel, Babayaga, is set in Paris in the 1950s, and it features spies, witches, and a cop who’s been transformed into a flea. Those three elements together are intriguing, but the fact that it’s written by Barlow, whose excellent first novel, Sharp Teeth,, was a werewolf story written in blank verse, is what makes Babayaga especially interesting. If Barlow can get armies of nerds excited about a book-length poem about a lycanthrope war, a stylish Cold War novel about a spy running up against characters from Russian folktales is a slam dunk. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free)