A brisk and intriguing espionage tale.
A debut historical novel about events surrounding the Dreyfus affair.
The story opens with a man named Percy Welles posing as a waiter at a club in London in 1898. He enters a private room and holds three men—one of whom is the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury—at gunpoint. Percy desperately needs a favor from Salisbury, and he’s willing to shoot the politician, should he fail to oblige. Gibson’s story veers back and forth between this scene and the various happenings that led to it. Percy, it turns out, is a freelance English journalist in Paris who, along with his French, female colleague, Georges Seigneur, becomes involved in a case to prove the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the French officer who was accused of selling secrets to the Germans and subsequently charged with treason. Percy, as a side job, acts as a go-between for the Foreign Office and a Count Esterhazy, a Hungarian-Frenchofficer who’s providing him with information to help fight against Germany.Gibson’s espionage plot is an engaging one, and the prose, while lacking lyricism, is detailed and descriptive: “There was no rain, but the night air was cold and damp, and halos formed around the gas lamps.” The characters feel fully formed, particularly with respect to Georges Seigneur, a fiery, opinionated journalist who insists on wearing trousers, regardless of what French law dictates about women’s apparel: “Georges meant to shock, and he felt a frisson of pleasure that she’d pulled it off so well.” Indeed, it’s Georges’ experience with discrimination that causes her to fight for Dreyfus, whom she believes was framed due to his Jewish faith. The story pacing is excellent, and the juxtaposition of past and present incidents keeps it from ever feeling stale.
A brisk and intriguing espionage tale.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73412-191-9
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.
The 25th novel featuring Silva’s legendary protagonist.
During his intersecting careers as art restorer and Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon has tangled with Russian gangsters and al-Qaida terrorists. He has become well-acquainted with operatives in multiple security agencies and befriended a paid assassin. He has busted art thieves and created passable forgeries by Renaissance masters and abstract Modernists. This latest installment centers around his relationship with the pope and a newly discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has gone missing from the Vatican. Silva’s novels tend to fall into two categories: books that reflect the politics of the day and books that don’t. His latest is one of the latter, which could be a treat for readers looking for escape, but it falls flat for a variety of reasons. Luxury has always been part of Gabriel Allon’s universe. It used to be an aspect of tradecraft, though. Allon would be wearing a very expensive suit and driving a very expensive car because he was posing as a client at a Swiss bank. Here, his wife is hosting a catered lunch for 150 of their daughter’s classmates in their apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. What once felt like a scintillating peek into the world of the obscenely wealthy now just feels…kind of obscene. Similarly, Allon goes chasing after a missing painting as a civilian—he retired from Mossad in Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022)—the same way another man his age might buy a speedboat or get hair plugs. As the story progresses, the stakes are raised, but it’s hard to forget that Allon is now a middle-aged man pursuing a dangerous hobby, rather than a spymaster leading his intrepid team to prevent a disaster that will disrupt the global order.
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063384217
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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