Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43621 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Synopsis
Art restorer and sometime spy Gabriel Allon is asked to visit Zurich, to clean the work of an Old Master for a millionaire banker. But when he gets there he finds the corpse of his client in a pool of blood beneath the masterpiece, and discovers that a secret collection of priceless paintings stolen by Nazis in the war is missing. With the Swiss authorities trying to pin the murder on Allon and a powerful cabal determined to make sure this wartime secret remains buried, the art restorer must use all his former spy skills to find out the truth. And with an assassin that he helped to train also on the loose, Allon will need all his wits just to stay alive.

Customer Reviews

"Beware the Gnomes of Zurich...All Switzerland is a bank."
Revolving around the role of Swiss bankers and financiers (the Gnomes) in financing the German war effort during World War II, Daniel Silva's fifth novel, and the second to feature Gabriel Allon, examines the role of this supposedly neutral nation in prolonging the war and in profiting from the looting of Jewish accounts and art collections. Here Gabriel Allon, an art restorer who has also worked as an assassin for Israeli Intelligence, is called upon to restore a Raphael painting, only to discover the owner of the painting, Augustus Rolfe, dead upon his arrival. Further investigation reveals that Rolfe, a banker, also hid a large art collection in his basement vault, though it has now vanished.

As Allon comes to know Rolfe's violinist daughter Anna, he must avoid the Swiss police, who are dedicated to preserving bank secrecy laws and the appearance of propriety even as they aid in the hiding of Jewish artifacts. In league with a secret Swiss cabal which will stop at nothing to preserve their own ill-gotten gains, the police also believe that Anna may know more than she lets on. A second plot, which eventually ties in with the main plot, features "the English Assassin," who works for a don in Corsica who is planning a major assassination. As the plot twists from Zurich to Germany, Portugal, France, England, and Corsica, Allon and the English assassin come closer to a showdown.

Based on facts about Swiss banking and its laws, which guarantee secrecy and allow Nazi plunder to be owned by Swiss citizens if they "acquired it in good faith," the novel allows the author to personalize some of the abuses and weave them into his novel. Though the plot is a bit difficult to follow, at times, since the exact connection with the English Assassin is not clear for much of the novel, it moves quickly and bloodily forward, filled with violence, beatings, torture, and murder. The villains are truly villainous, and the good guys, if not virtuous, are at least "honorable" in intention and ruled by good motives.

Unfortunately, the novel is too broad to allow for much character identification, and the movement throughout Europe prevents a sense of place and atmosphere from developing. Switzerland, though the main location, is shown selectively through negative elements which advance the plot. The climax, when it occurs, is not the blockbuster one would expect. Rather, it is more a fizzling out of details as the novel comes to a conclusion, though not necessarily a resolution. Silva is a terrific thriller writer, but this is not his most thrilling novel. Mary Whipple

Let itself down in the final quarter!
This is my first reading of Silva's efforts and I was expecting a fairly run-of-the-mill airport pulp novel. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised - it's actually pretty good. Comparisons with Le Carre` are somewhat unfounded though, as no-one has ever captured the tension, monotony and danger of espionage as Le Carre`

Silva's protagonist - art restorer and sometime Israeli spy Gabriel Allon - is decent enough and imbued with enough of everything that makes a good character. The plot is fast moving and credible - when Allon arrives in Zurich to clean a Raphael, he finds himself standing in the client's blood and subsequently hounded for his murder, while others have dispatched an assassin to clean up the mess.

Everything moves along nicely - the plot movements are realistic and believable, there is a decent level of antagonism that Allon finds himself up against. Up until the last quarter of the book, everything is A-ok.

And then the wheels kinda fall off - without wishing to spoil the plot, there are two utterly bizarre character reverses that destroy much of the remaining credibility of the story. It comes somewhat out of the blue and leaves the reader thinking "Why, why why?" The first time it happens is bad enough - I flipped back thinking I'd missed something. The second time it happened, I feel really betrayed.

So, from a 5-star thriller to a 2-star one in a flash! I don't mind surprising plot movements, but I do expect the characters to act/react in a predictable manner in keeping with their well, characters. That's what character is - how they behave. At no point in the preceding pages did Silve lead the reader to believe these two were prone to schizophrenic episodes.

All in all, it gets three stars, but I feel a real unease about reading more of Silva's work if he's prone to such unnatural character diversions.

Good story, well researched.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Being an avid reader of Le Carre, Deighton, Porter et al I've been looking for another series to work through, and the Gabriel Allon sequence looks like fitting the bill nicely. A great page-turner, very well plotted, extensively researched and some very tense scenes that don't always work out how you'd expect. Now for the next one !...