The Secret Servant

Once again, a seemingly benign case leads Gabriel Allon, Israeli spy, into a complex plot. This time Islamic extremists capture the American ambassador to England's daughter. Allon is requested to assist in the recover operation. This novel is Silva's best yet. A real page turner. I won't spoil the plot but I am already looking forward to Silva's next. I am afraid he will somehow change the character since it is time for Allon to move up the ranks within his organization to director. Enjoy

This was the first book by Daniel Silva that I have read. I liked it so much that I ordered all of the rest of his books as soon as I finished it. My wife is now reading it and she can not lay it down.

I like to follow a character through several novels, Jack Ryan, Scott Harvath, Alex Hawke to name a few. I like authors who do the research for what's going on in todays world. Often these plot lines are based on sources inside intelligent services with deferance to security of course. Bottom line, most of this stuff is happening somewhere in the world. This was the first novel by Daniel Silva i have read and I'm hooked, going to buy the rest. Very nicely paced, great action and intrigue. Picked it up on a recomendation on the radio, finished it in 3 days. Buy it.

Daniel Silva has yet again written a novel that at the same time will entertain and scare the hell out of you; a novel as well researched and believable as LeCarre in his Cold War glory days, but moving at the pace of Follett or Forsythe at the top of their story-telling skills. In "The Secret Servant", Gabriel Allon, the avenging angel of Israel's formidable secret service, is back to do battle again with the ever-rising tide of radical Islam terrorism. Sent to Amsterdam on a seemingly routine mission to clean up after an assassinated undercover agent, Allon unwittingly uncovers an Al Qaeda-like plot which leads him to London and Elizabeth Halton, the daughter of the US Ambassador to The United Kingdom. Unable - barely - to thwart Elizabeth's kidnapping, Allon sets out with his familiar cast of "citizens of the night" from Tel Aviv's intelligence service, taking him on what I thought his most challenging and harrowing assignment since the days of his youth when he was summoned to wreck vengeance on the Black September perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. While the main course in "Secret Service" is harrowing suspense and action, told with brutal force and free-flowing blood, the venue here is the very real and very dangerous Islamification of Europe. And while Silva's popularity certainly suffers from blunt talk that may offend the more sensitive or liberal-minded readers, this is a straightforward and intelligent dissection of the threats facing the west today. But it is hardly simple, one-sided, Zionist rhetoric, for while there is no doubt on which side of the conflict Silva falls, he paints a surprisingly balanced picture of the enormity of the issue, wrapping his fiction around radical Islam's rise from the brutal poverty in ghettos in Middle east, fomenting hate fueled by the blunders of the west, and especially of the secular governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In short, gripping fiction with all the right adrenalin charged superlatives. But while the ending may be predictable, and the story is one that you'll recall with each new tale of terrorism in the headlines, "The Secret Servant" falls short on redemption, knowing that while individual acts of terror may be thwarted, the larger war rages on just below the that level of collective conscience we'd prefer not to acknowledge.