License: GPL
I bought this book by Daniel Silva last week at SFO, faced with a long wait for the red eye back home, since I recalled hearing about it on NPR, and reading a review in Time magazine, or was it the New Yorker? Anyway, the review said he is his generation’s finest writer of international intrigue, one of America’s most gifted spy novelists ever. I guess Graham Greene and John le Carre belong to an older generation. Anyway, everything I read or heard about it was very positive.
Daniel Silva is far less cynical than Le Carre, and his world does not gel quite as well, to my ears, as Smiley’s circus did. The hero, Gabriel Allon, does have some super human traits, but, thank the lord, is not James bond. I was impressed by Silva’s geo-politics, though - paragraphs from the book seem to appear almost verbatim in current event reports in the International Herald Tribune and BBC stories.
I like this books (to the extent of ordering another 7 from this author from Amazon today), and appreciate the influx of new blood in the international espionage market. Lately, the genre has been treated by lack luster, mediocre knock offs of the Bourne Identity — and the engaging pace of the original has never been successfully replicated in the sequels. And Silva’s writing is better than Ludlum’s.