The English Assassin
From AwardAnnals
| This creative work has a long or truncated description. Please review the creative work guidelines concerning descriptions and edit down or replace the description. |
 | |
| Author(s) | Daniel Silva |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Signet |
| Honors | |
| Gabriel Allon had done much in his lifetime. A sometime Israeli spy by trade, an art restorer by preference, he knew more than he wanted to know about death and betrayal and secrets, but that didn’t keep him from being surprised by the scene before him now. An assignment to clean an Old Master at the home of a millionaire banker had led him to a house in Zurich, and standing in the room now, he smelled the odor of salt and rust, felt the dampness of the carpet beneath his feet. He touched his fingers to the carpet and brought them to his face. He was standing… | |
Gabriel Allon had done much in his lifetime. A sometime Israeli spy by trade, an art restorer by preference, he knew more than he wanted to know about death and betrayal and secrets, but that didn’t keep him from being surprised by the scene before him now.
An assignment to clean an Old Master at the home of a millionaire banker had led him to a house in Zurich, and standing in the room now, he smelled the odor of salt and rust, felt the dampness of the carpet beneath his feet. He touched his fingers to the carpet and brought them to his face. He was standing in blood. And he knew his life would never be the same.
Before he is through, Allon will find himself swept into a spiraling chain of events involving stolen art, a decades-old suicide, and a dark and bloody trail of killings—some of them his own. The spy world he thought he had put aside will envelope him once again. And he will battle for his life against the assassin he himself helped train, and who will demonstrate to his teacher just how much he has learned.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
The English Assassin brings back Gabriel Allon, the appealingly melancholy art restorer with a double life as an Israeli secret agent, first introduced in 2000’s The Kill Artist. Gabriel is sent to Zurich under a pseudonym to restore a Raphael belonging to a prominent Swiss banker and art collector, Augustus Rolfe, but upon arriving he finds Rolfe lying in a pool of blood. When Gabriel tries to leave Zurich, the Swiss police capture him immediately—and moreover, they know his real identity. He’s released through some diplomatic string-pulling, but he soon discovers that Rolfe had requested a meeting with Israeli intelligence, for reasons unknown, just before his death.
Rolfe’s daughter, Anna, is a world-class violinist attempting to rebuild her career after an accident that nearly destroyed one of her hands. But her physical scars are nothing compared to those on her psyche, left by her mother’s suicide when Anna was a teenager. Temperamental and mistrustful, she nevertheless believes Gabriel’s story, and reveals that Rolfe owned a secret collection of priceless French Impressionist paintings, apparently stolen by his murderers.
As Gabriel begins to put together the pieces of the puzzle, he faces two adversaries: a powerful group of men who would do anything to bury the past forever, and a hired killer who’s planning a spectacular murder. Like The Kill Artist, The English Assassin balances fascinating characters, authentic-sounding historical detail, and plenty of glamorous international intrigue on the edge of a knife-keen plot. —Barrie Trinkle
Barnes and Noble
Daniel Silva’s fourth novel, The Kill Artist, introduced an unusual but credible new hero: Gabriel Allon, a world-class art restorer and former member of the Israeli Secret Service. The Kill Artist brought Allon out of retirement to confront the Palestinian agent who destroyed his family. In Allon’s latest adventure, The English Assassin, he comes out of retirement once again and finds himself enmeshed in a murder investigation whose roots reach back to the cataclysmic policies of Nazi Germany.
Allon’s involvement begins when he accepts a commission to restore a priceless Raphael original. He travels to Zurich, only to find that his client—wealthy Swiss banking magnate Augustus Rolfe—has been shot to death just hours before. On the heels of that discovery, Allon is arrested by the Swiss police and narrowly avoids prosecution. When Allon’s former mentor, legendary spymaster Ari Shamron, informs him that Rolfe had recently requested a meeting with the Israeli Secret Service, Allon launches an investigation of his own.
At the heart of the novel’s central mystery lies another mystery. According to the victim’s daughter, world-famous violinist Anna Rolfe, a valuable collection of Impressionist paintings disappeared from Rolfe’s house at the time of the murder. The paintings, as Allon discovers, may have been part of the vast collection looted by the Nazis before and during World War II. As Allon pursues the missing paintings, he begins to understand the close—in fact, collaborative—relationship that once existed between the Nazi hierarchy and the wealthy banking community of neutral Switzerland.
Silva’s prose is clean and uncluttered, his action sequences crisp and effective, his sense of place impeccable, and his varied cast of characters all sharply individualized. Ultimately, though, it’s the impressive level of secondary detail—the scrupulous historical research, the insights into the arcane world of the professional art restorer—that give this book its distinctive flavor and lift it above the level of the garden variety espionage novel. Like The Kill Artist, The English Assassin is an intelligent, informed, engrossing entertainment that is deeply rooted in the historical realities of a violent, tragic century. (Bill Sheehan)
