The English Assassin
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4.4 • 89 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Spy turned art restorer Gabriel Allon finds himself accused of murder in this New York Times bestseller from Daniel Silva.
An Israeli spy by trade and art restorer by preference, Gabriel Allon arrives in Zurich to restore the work of an Old Master for a millionaire banker—and finds himself standing in blood and framed for the man’s murder.
While trying to clear his name, Allon is swept into a spiraling chain of events involving Nazi art theft, a decades-old suicide, and a dark and bloody trail of killings—some of them his own. The spy world Allon thought he had left behind has come back to haunt him. And he will have to fight for his life—against an assassin he himself helped train.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Switzerland's shameful behavior in WWII provides the backdrop for this superbly crafted thriller that puts Silva at the forefront of his generation of foreign intrigue specialists. Here, the former CNN correspondent also appears to have settled on a main character to propel his promising line Gabriel Allon, the art restorer and Israeli hit man who starred in last year's acclaimed The Kill Artist. Just a few pages into this sequel, Allon finds himself the apparent victim of a double cross. When he arrives to restore a Raphael owned by reclusive Swiss banker Augustus Rolfe, Allon not only discovers the banker dead but finds himself the number one suspect. The charge doesn't stick, however, and when he is released from custody, he vows to find out who tried to frame him. His first stop is Rolfe's daughter, Anna, one of the world's top violinists and a woman haunted by her family's heritage of wartime greed and cruelty. Allon catches the attention of Switzerland's secretive power structure, which intends to stymie any further investigation into Rolfe's murder and the theft of his suspiciously acquired art collection. The so-called Council of R tli contracts with a shadowy hit man, known only as the Englishman, to eliminate Allon and anyone else who threatens to expose Switzerland's past. The action unfolds in tightly focused scenes played out across a spectrum of European capitals and more pastoral settings. As a historical framework, the secrets of the Bahnhofstrasse are well-trod territory, yet Silva's sophisticated treatment polished prose, an edgy mood, convincing research gives his plot a crisp, almost urgent quality.
