An adrenaline-fueled spy romp that almost makes its familiar tropes seem new.
A former contract assassin finds the spy game a lot harder than it looks.
Ambassador Claus Eichberg rots in a Tunisian prison, blaming “Caspian Anderson and his cockroach of a girlfriend” and praying for death, which is finally, brutally delivered by villainous Hwang Sung-jin. For his part, Caspian, formerly an assassin under the code name Elias, currently works for the Defense Clandestine Service and is in Kenya tailing Brazilian politician Dolores Araujo, who’s secretly a paid Chinese asset. Following Araujo through the slums of Nairobi, he’s gobsmacked to spot the aforementioned girlfriend, Liesel Bergmann, apparently similarly engaged. Like him, she’s an experienced operative with an impressive resume. Simmering under the turbulent action of Elias’ second adventure is the same question that propelled the first (The Elias Network, 2024): Can Caspian trust Liesel? His latest mission takes him to France and ultimately Tanzania, but not before he ricochets around Washington and environs and commiserates with his family in Portland, Maine. The droll joke is that his parents and his brother, Nelson, a physician for Doctors Without Borders, expect mild-mannered Caspian to settle down in Portland and take over his dad’s modest trucking business. The mission he’s pursuing instead involves Frank LaBelle, a rather naïve tech chief executive. Caspian finds himself periodically facing perilous predicaments and twists of allegiance. Cryptocurrency of course figures prominently, and Sung-jin reappears for an evil encore. Gervais deftly shuffles his large cast of characters like pieces on a chessboard, with well-timed “surprises” and many chapters ending in cliffhangers.
An adrenaline-fueled spy romp that almost makes its familiar tropes seem new.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781662518553
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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