Daniel Silva: THE COLLECTOR
Gabriel Allon has retired to Venice with his wife and children after five years heading the most lethal branch of
Israel’s secret service. He resumes his other career as an art restorer (the
best in the business) but accepts a commission to investigate the murder in
Amalfi of a shipping tycoon who happened to own a missing Vermeer portrait,
stolen more than thirty years ago.
The trail leads, as it often does in Daniel Silva’s stories, to the decadent Kremlin of Vladimir Vladimirovich (only in the post-script does he add the surname beginning with P). A honey-trapped Danish oil tycoon is an intermediary for the stolen art and implicated in a daring scheme to escalate the Ukraine war into a nuclear Armageddon.
To thwart this apocalyptic plan, Gabriel recruits a newcomer to his team, an IT hacker, also Danish, with a sideline as a cat-burglar (she stole the stolen Vermeer but didn’t kill the tycoon), who reminded me of Modesty Blaise, a superwoman from the era of Ian Fleming’s original Bond books. Like Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty, Silva’s Ingrid should be – and almost is – too good to be believed, but the author brings her and his story to a nail-biting climax on the Russian-Finnish border, where the skills from Gabriel Allon’s first career as a Mossad assassin come in handy.
Daniel Silva’s twenty-third Gabriel Allon adventure is one of the most outlandish and dangerously close to being a parody, but the sheer pace of this ‘caper’ carries the reader breathlessly along. Another terrific read from my long-term favourite thriller writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment