The Fallen Angel: A Novel (Gabriel Allon Book 12)

Daniel Silva has a knack for taking tidbits of history, stirring in some current events and coming up with a blockbuster. His latest, The Fallen Angel, is no exception. This book is Silva's 15th novel and the 12th book in his Gabriel Allon series.Fine art restorer and sometime Israeli assassin, Gabriel Allon, is staying in the Vatican where he is restoring a Caravaggio painting. The personal secretary to the pope, Monsignor Luigi Donati, comes to Allon with a problem. The director of antiquities for the Vatican, Claudia Andreatti, is found dead in the Basilica. The Vatican police and the Swiss Guards are calling it a suicide. Donati suspects something more sinister and asks Allon to conduct his own secret investigation. Andreatti was conducting her own secret investigation into the authenticity and provenance of the Vatican's collection. The monsignor believes that Andreatti uncovered something that cost her her life.The murder leads Allon to the world of stolen antiquities. But he also discovers that the profits of this illegal and lucrative trade are funding the terrorist group, Hezbollah. Also, at least one of the men involved has ties to the Vatican Bank. Soon, Allon is assembling his old team. First they need to deal with a terrorist plot in Germany. But they will eventually end up in Jerusalem where Hezbollah is suspected of plotting something so dangerous that it threatens the future of Israel and all that Jews hold dear--especially the Temple Mount.I always enjoy the history that Silva weaves into his novels. But I also find the world of espionage and spies a fascinating one. More and more, information is obtained through technology as opposed to people on the streets. "In the digital age, secret messages could be transmitted instantly over the Internet disguised as something entirely harmless. Casing photos for a terrorist attack could be hidden within pictures of girls in swimsuits; a message to an active terror cell inside a recipe for boeuf bourguinon. Press a few buttons on a computer keyboard and the pretty girls become pictures of government buildings or subway platforms in New York City."The Fallen Angel would make a great movie--just the venues (Rome, the Vatican, and Jerusalem) would be spectacular on the big screen. But for as much as I enjoyed this novel, I gave it four stars because it was just a little too unbelievable in spots.

Some how this didn't grip me as much as the others. Gabriel is back in the Vatican restoring a Caravaggio and a secretary falls from a high balcony. I think the story was just too convoluted for me and about money laundering and corruption and detailed archaeology that doesn't interest me that much. I certainly don't regret reading it.TID BITS....and how it had been looted from a tomb in 1971 and sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the astonishing price of one million dollars, and how......it had been returned to its rightful home. Cultural patrimony had been protected, but at what cost. Nearly five million people visited the Met each year, but here in the deserted halls of the Villa Giulia, the krater was left to stand alone with the sadness of a knickknack gathering dust on a shelf.That's why the Palestians like to pretend the Temple never existed......Temple Denial......It's a first cousin to Holocaust Denial, and it's now widespread in the Islamic world......No Holocaust, no Temple, no Jews in Palestine."One of the last Agency executives to come from New England Protestant stock, he believed vanity was a sin only exceeded by cheating at golf.At its height the Jewish quarter of Vienna numbered 192,000 people but by November, 1942 only 7,000 remained....but the Holocaust was not the first destruction of Vienna's Jews. In 1421 the entire Jewish population was burned to death, forcibly baptized or expelled. The Austrians, it seemed, felt compelled to slaughter the Jews from time to time.

Daniel Silva returns to the publishing world with a new Gabriel Allon book every year, in July, like clockwork. This year's "model" is "The Fallen Angel" and Silva has produced a stylish book that does not seem to have the problems of Silva's few previous books which were good stories but peopled with characters who were somewhat stagnant in their development. Most were still around after their "sell-by" dates. The last couple of reviews, I praised the plots but complained about Gabriel Allon - still the tormented art restorer/spy/assassin, his young, nubile and impossibly beautiful wife, Chiara, his former boss, Ari Shomron, still the aging-out-of-this-life lion of King Saul Street, and the other old standbys, whose lives seemed to be as unchanged as Silva could make them and still produce a book with a plot.Silva's 2012 Gabriel Allon is now in Rome, restoring a priceless work of art by Caravagio (ALL works of art by Caravagio are priceless, I think) in the Vatican. He and Chiara are trying to get their lives back after last summer's dramatic activities, as recounted in "Portrait of a Spy". While working in the Vatican, he's called in to investigate the death of an Italian art historian doing work on Vatican treasures. The Vatican, like museums everywhere, had some art that was of dubious provenance. In investigating the death of the art historian, Gabriel and Chiara, working as a team, discover other deaths, Mafia connections, and, of course, terrorism plots. The action continues as a long-time reader of Daniel Silva has come to expect.As a book reviewer, I've always tried to review books against an author's back list, if possible. You can't compare Daniel Silva with Leo Tolstoy - nor would you want to - so I compare "Angel" to "Portrait" and the others in the series. By using the past as the yardstick for the present, I can confidently give Silva's newest "model" five stars. But this year I'm happy to report that the woodenness of the characters (who sometimes approach caricatures of "Israel spy", "Unbelievably gorgeous Italian chick", etc) is a little less apparent. They're sorta, anyway, approaching "real". I was not alone in pointing this out in reviews of Silva's previous books; many other reviewers did, too.This year's book, "The Fallen Angel" is another good Daniel Silva novel. With more believable characters. A bonus.

Gabriel Allon is back in the Vatican, restoring a priceless painting by Caravaggio. A female archaeologist is found dead beneath the gallery in the dome of St Peter's Basilica. The pope's private secretary asks Gabriel to investigate whether she jumped or was thrown to her death.Since Gabriel is not just an art restorer but also a retired superspy-cum-hitman for the Israeli secret service, we can guess that the signorina did not commit suicide. And, as we always anticipate from Daniel Silva, solving her murder will uncover a planned terrorist outrage (another one!) against the Vatican and the State of Israel. The trail leads from Rome to Vienna and Jerusalem - the Pope is about to make a visit to the Holy Land.OK, these are locations Mr Silva has guided us through before and the conspiracy is also something of a 'revamp' (with a bit of Dan Brown-style archaeology thrown into the stew), but Silva's writing is superior to most other thriller-writers and he always gives Zion's enemies (it's Hezbollah and the Iranians this time) a scarily plausible fanaticism. Pope Paul VII, Silva's imagined successor to the Polish prelate, appealingly combines characteristics of Benedict, Francis and John Paul.THE FALLEN ANGEL builds its suspense up to a cinematic finale beneath the Temple Mount. A story that seems to be torn from tomorrow's headlines, this is another total 'humdinger' from one of today's best thriller-writers.[Reviewer is the author of THE BEXHILL MISSILE CRISIS]

I so look forward to the publication of the next Daniel Silva Gabriel Allon book and I have relished and savoured all 12 In the series.With great difficulty I managed to hold back The Fallen Angel for my holiday and devoured it in less than a couple of days.All the expected and long established elements were there,the book was impeccably researched and was bang up to date in terms of the political sensitivities of the Middle East. As always the writing was of the highest order and the plot was gripping and credible.And yet.......and yet.Reading a Gabriel Allon story is like being reunited with an old friend.you know who you will meet and to a large extent how they will look, react, speak and behave.For example the bickering yet brilliant group of his Office support team, Chiara's hair etc etc.Allon does acknowledge his age with a few self-deprecatory senior moment jokes - he has be be about 62 years old now and whilst I am happy and eager to read Mr Silva 's annual offering I just feel that the format needs updating.In no way am I suggesting that the books are now being written by rote,the amount of research confirms that and Silva at half-cock is still far superior to 99.9% of the other thriller writers out there but I just feel that something needs to change.I think that comparisons are invidious but another wonderful thriller writer, or perhaps I should say another wonderful writer who just happens to write thrillers is Michael Connelly. He is now up to I believe his 25th book and yet his main protagonist, the detective Harry Bosch maintains and even increases our interest through his continual evolution and as a man and the way in which his character and life develops as iAs the case with most people in real life.He changes role and job, he has a daughter, there is his interrelationship with the newer character Micky Haller.All this and more keeps the reader's interest high and somewhere in there I think there might be a message for Mr Silva.His books are wonderful, and he has a formula that works,and it certainly ain't broke but in my humble opinion I think there might be just a little bit of fixing to be done for the next book.

I've been a Silva fan since  The Secret Servant , but really didn't get on with the limply structured  Portrait of a Spy  and worried that his switch to HarperCollins meant he had lost a useful editor somewhere in the transition.I was wrong. This, the second of his HarperCollins books, is not quite up there with the superlative Ivan books ( Moscow Rules  and  The Defector ) or his very best work,  The Rembrandt Affair , but it's really good - wonderful summer reading, with pace to rival any thriller on the market, but a thoughtfulness and turn of phrase that sets it above 99.9% of them.Structurally, about two-thirds of the way through there is again a strange (if brief) listlessness: the goal seems not quite so pressing, the enemies not quite so relentless, the odds not quite so bad. This killed 'Portrait' for me, but here it's fleeting enough here that things do recover.I wish things got tighter and tighter, more and more focused, as the novel progresses - as they do with amazing skill in 'Secret Servant', 'Defector' or 'Rembrandt' (Silva's best by far). When Silva's plotting is on the mark, only Lee Child rivals him, and no one comes near him for sheer impish narratorial grace.But this is still an extremely pleasant eight or so hours in the company of much-loved characters; a chance to visit some of the finest cities in the world with an author who has done his research; and a superbly compelling peek into the tradecraft and traumas of life in one of the world's most legendary intelligence agencies.NB. Obviously, pricing will probably change over time and this may not be relevant in future, but I also want to record how impressed I was with the pricing policy taken for this book - £16 in hardcover, but £4.99 on Kindle on day of release. This is far more reasonable than most publishers, and very much appreciated - the money saved will be reinvested in further Silva books, that's for sure. The Secret ServantPortrait of a SpyMoscow RulesThe DefectorThe Rembrandt Affair

I like the books of Daniel Silva, The stories are a bit hard to believe sometimes...the Israel secret service is a bit too good to be true;...finding air flights, save houses...all is realized in no time ...Just try it yourselves!!!But it's entertaining and an easy read..What disturbs me the most is the frequent , what I call "copy and paste"...In every book a lot of paragraphs are repeats of the same paragraphs in previous books... so much so that sometimes I start doubting: did I already read this book? If you have read several books, you start to know them by heart.It looks to me a rather cheap way to fill the pages. a pity.

Allon is a cool hero,a man of few words,but when there a big problem,you definitely want him around. Typical Gabriel at beginning he's retired,but he's doing something he always likes doing Art Restoring ,and then he's called to investigate a death and the real plot unfold. You have to be patient when reading these books, because the book's pace is a gradual build up and when it picks up the pace it is an enjoyable read,I like all the Allon books I've read so far and I will keep on reading them.