A smart summer escape.
Silva’s latest Gabriel Allon novel is a bit of a throwback—in the best possible way.
One-time assassin and legendary spymaster Gabriel Allon has finally retired. After saying farewell to his friends and colleagues in Israel, he moves with his wife, Chiara, and their two young children to a piano nobile overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal. His plan is to return to the workshop where he learned to restore paintings as an employee—but only after he spends several weeks recovering from the bullet wound that left him dead for several minutes in The Cellist (2021). Of course, no one expects Gabriel to entirely withdraw from the field, and, sure enough, a call from his friend and occasional asset Julian Isherwood sends him racing around the globe on the trail of art forgers who are willing to kill to protect their extremely lucrative enterprise. Silva provides plenty of thrills and, as usual, offers a glimpse into the lifestyles of the outrageously wealthy. In the early books in this series, it was Gabriel’s work as an art restorer that set him apart from other action heroes, and his return to that world is the most rewarding part of this installment. It is true that, at this point in his storied career, Gabriel has become a nearly mythic figure. And Silva is counting on a lot of love—and willing suspension of disbelief—when Gabriel whips up four old master canvases that fool the world’s leading art experts as a lure for the syndicate selling fake paintings. That said, as Silva explains in an author’s note, the art market is rife with secrecy, subterfuge, and wishful thinking, in no small part because it is almost entirely unregulated. And, if anyone can crank out a Titian, a Tintoretto, a Gentileschi, and a Veronese in a matter of days, it’s Gabriel Allon. The author’s longtime fans may breathe a sigh of relief that this entry is relatively free of politics and the pandemic is nowhere in sight.
A smart summer escape.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-283485-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.
An epic battle between good and evil with a mystic twist.
When she was 10, Vida visited a fortuneteller who presented her with two broadly different futures and prophesied that she’d be “a champion of the natural world and all its beauty.” Now Vida, raised by her late great-uncle Ogden in a remote cabin surround by the beauties of nature, has no fear of wild animals, including the wolves led by her friend Lupo. Taught by Ogden, Vida, who has a special talent for dredging up gemstones, makes a living by means of a placer mine in a nearby river on government land. Her lover, school principal and activist José Nochelobo, dies in what seems to be an accident but turns out to have been murder. Terrence Boschvark, a wealthy psychopath who’ll stop at nothing to develop some nearby land, is behind the evil doings near her home. Vida, certain that someone is watching her, patiently waits for him to show himself. When he does, he turns out to be deputy sheriff Nash Deacon, who accuses her of killing his cousin Belden Bead and demands that she surrender to him body and soul. Deacon plays a game of sexual terrorism with Vida, who watched his drug-dealing cousin die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and buried him and his car with her uncle’s backhoe. Now she plans for Deacon to be next. Once she kills and buries Deacon and his car, Vida becomes the subject of a manhunt by Boschvark’s remorseless killers. The mystical forces within her lead her to a place of hope. With some help from two native people and a tracker hired to find her, she fights for her life.
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781662500510
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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