Daniel Silva

Setting aside the suspension-of-disbelief conventions of the spy genre, Silva's books about the assassin-cum-art-restorer are among the best of the breed. This volume brings Allon back to Vienna, where his family was destroyed in an earlier book, with ensuing complications, in order to solve a mystery surrounding his own mother and a hitherto-unknown SS monster. As always, Silva explores the rotten under-layer of US and Vatican complicity in the Nazi atrocities (pre and post war), but is not show more uncritical of Jewish and Israeli actions as well. Even when you know The Office is in control, though, you can't be sure which setbacks are contrived for a purpose, and which ones are real.

The rationale for the entire series is to disclose the horrors of the Holocaust to a new generation, in an era where forgetfulness, as well as out-right denial, are rampant.

Addendum: I really should read these in the correct order for series continuity (so far have read #10, 8, and now 4), but Silva covers the back-story naturally and fully enough for the drop-in reader.

NOTES: The Code of the Spooks is something like the Code of the West in Louis L'Amour books: a set of principles that sometimes has to be explicated for the reader. And sparks disagreement between the principals.
P. 252: "Sometimes, intelligence services must utilize the services of evil men to achieve results that are good.." vs. "There's a difference between using evil individuals as sources and hiring them as intelligence officers."
p. 300: Why pursuing the elderly Nazis and putting them on trial differs from assassinating the Black September killers of Israeli Olympic team members. "I don't just want to kill him. I want the world to know what this man did." vs. "So they could spout their propaganda from an Israeli court?...They already did that...right here in this city, in front of all the world's cameras. It wasn't our job to give them another opportunity to justify the massacre of innocents."
(pointing out that The Office is confident it always gets the right perpetrator, which is necessary to the genre -- but raises real-world questions).
p. 355: "As for the truth (about the Final Solution), no one cared while this place was in operation, and no one will care now." On a page I can't find now (twice, IIRC), the old Nazi expresses his amazement that the Reich's commanders ordered him to destroy evidence of the mass murders by incinerating the bodies, and yet live prisoners walk out of one of the camps to escape the oncoming Allies, "because they still needed their (totally useless) labor." show less

This is the fourth in the series about Gabriel Allon, former Mossad operative and current art restorer. I liked this one by far the best because it contained more history and less Israeli Bond girls caricatures.

When a friend is severely injured in a bomb blast, Gabriel defies authorities and returns to Vienna, a city that haunts his past. An informant points him toward Herr Vogel, an Austrian businessman who may have been a Nazi war criminal. As Gabriel gets closer to the truth, he also show more learns more about events in his mother's life during the Holocaust. Is hunting down former Nazis still relevant today? What does justice look like for these elderly war criminals?

This book references heavily Aktion 1005, the Nazis' attempt to destroy the millions of bodies that would serve as evidence of their crimes. Although I had read about this in books on Treblinka and Sobibor, I hadn't realized that it began in the Ukraine. It also touches on Bishop Alois Hudal's Ratlines for helping Nazis escape after the war, and Reinhard Gehlen, who went from being an intelligence agent for the Nazis to running intelligence operations for the American CIA and West Germany against the Russians. Lots of controversial topics that are not well-known provide the backdrop to the action. I had nearly given up on this series, but this book has definitely hooked me again. show less

Sooner or later most of the thriller series that are not domiciled in a single location or country end up with a Vatican/secret society installment. Silva's series had always been a prime candidate for that - and that is exactly what this third novel is.

Meet Mario Delvecchio, a 51 years old restorer in Venice, working on a Bellini altarpiece and being his usual lonely self, even when the team that is restoring the rest of the church. Until he gets some news from Munich arrive that is - a show more friend of his is killed and it seems like the book he had been writing is missing.

The Italian restorer is actually Gabriel Allon, an assassin for the Israeli secret services. Ari Shamron, his ex-boss, knows how to pull the right strings and before long the art is (temporarily) abandoned and Gabriel is racing across Europe. And the pursuit takes him from Rome to London and from France to Germany. Somewhere along the line, he ends up with half of the police force of Europe trying to get him (for various reasons), discovers a secret Catholic society that had been instrumental in some of the decision made by the Popes and meets a Pope - who turns out to be an interesting character. Of course there is a lot more - a beautiful woman, an assassin and an old secret from the early days of WWII.

When I read a book from this series for the first time, I was not sure if I really want to read a series about an assassin. But it somehow works - Allon is not perfect but he does not pretend to be; he kills because it is his job - and he pays the price for it. This book is not an exception (including almost managing to die) and the story is as compelling as the previous two in the series. The plot should not have worked - it is so overused that I was not sure I can read one more book on the topic without being bored. And yet it works - partially because the Jewish and Catholic faith had been the historical counterparts in a long war; partially because Silva can write. Including managing to pull a surprise ending when you do not expect it - one that is not necessarily needed but without it, the book will be incomplete - even if I would not have thought so if it was not there at all.

I can see the end of this book changing some things in the fictional world of Gabriel Allon. I will be interested to see how Silva handles that going forward. And I wonder if we will meat the Pope again - the pair of a Jewish assassin and a Catholic Pope sounds like someone's dream (or nightmare for some people) but the two men are very similar in a lot of ways.

Overall another great book by Daniel Silva. show less

I read this book on vacation in Vienna, thinking it would be a good mystery set in the city I was discovering. It turned out to be a much more serious and darker book than I anticipated, but excellent. I had just come from Berlin, where my husband and I spent hours in the German Historical Museum learning about Germany's troubled past (by the way, every country has a troubled past - I'm not just citing Germany here). We spent some time learning about the events leading up to WWII and show more Germany's anti-Semitic leanings, and so reading this book shortly afterwards was pretty interesting. I'm glad the book was set in Vienna, as opposed to a city in Gemany, so I could understand the breadth of the Nazi movement. I also did not know much about what happened to all of the European war criminals other than the Nuremburg Trials, so this rounded out my knowledge. Silva does a nice job educating, while at the same time providing a thrilling reading experience. Even though I was looking for something lighter, I am glad this was the book I chose to read while in Vienna. show less