Book Review - “The Heist” - Daniel Silva – 475 pages – Harper Collins - Reviewed by: Jeb Ladouceur
With each of his novels, Daniel Silva climbs ever higher in the ranks of American authors of Spy Fiction. Now, with the introduction this month of his newest thriller, “The Heist,” Silva seems to have ridden his popular hero ‘Gabriel Allon’ (the protagonist of fourteen of his seventeen best sellers) all the way to the top of the heap.
Never mind Buckley, Cussler, and Ludlum … it seems there’s a new king of International Espionage reigning; he’s the 54-year-old father of two, who lives in Florida with his acclaimed wife NBC National Correspondent, Jaime Gangel, and is known frequently to take his children, Lily and Nicholas, on junkets with him when researching his several books abroad.
That means, of course, that Nicholas and Lily have seen quite a bit of the civilized world … particularly the art-rich centers of Europe and the Middle East. You see, the peripatetic ‘Gabriel Allon’ (though fictitious) is probably the world’s best-known art restorer, an occupation that Silva neatly dovetails with Allon’s other intriguing vocation, that of Israeli Intelligence Expert.
In “The Heist,” whose title is the only thing I dislike about this book (it almost smacks of a two-bit stickup in Brooklyn), ‘Gabriel Allon’ is in the process of restoring a priceless altar painting for a church in Venice, when the only event that could take him from his labor of love suddenly occurs—a dear friend stands suspected of murder, and Gabriel must apply both his artistic expertise, and spying skills, to finding the real killer.
This blending of sixteenth century artisanship and state-of-the-art technological plotting is what makes Daniel Silva so fascinating, and in “The Heist” Silva’s fans get a double dose of the formula. That is not to say this book is so intricate as to be confusing; the author’s too good a writer to let that happen. Let’s put it this way, “The Heist” is twice as satisfying in the aggregate as the average Silva novel. Which is saying something!
One cannot help but wonder at Daniel Silva’s amalgamation of knowledge concerning the two dominant aspects of his thrillers. First, readers of the ‘Gabriel Allon’ series are invariably provided an almost scholarly treatise on the Renaissance, and the role of the Roman Catholic Church in commissioning and preserving painted masterworks. Following that, Silva habitually displays an uncanny knowledge of Middle Eastern (and specifically Israeli) demographics, as well as the history and practice of Judaism.
There is a good reason why the author is almost uniquely equipped to address these issues so confidently. Daniel Silva was born in Michigan, then moved to California as a child, where he was raised Roman Catholic. Significantly, some years later he converted to Judaism as an adult. Thus the man’s resulting keen insight into both aspects of the plots on which his ‘Gabriel Allon’ books are based, is eminently understandable.
“The Heist” reads as if it could have been written last week … though, the realities of publishing procedures inform to the contrary. Nonetheless, the more cynical among us might be forgiven if we question whether National Journalist Gangel might have had a hand in fashioning her husband’s timely plot this time around.
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Award-winning Smithtown writer Jeb Ladouceur is the author of eight novels, and his book and theater reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. In Ladouceur’s next thriller, “Harvest” due this month, an American doctor is seized and ordered to perform illicit surgeries for a sinister gang of organ traffickers in The Balkans.