The Other Woman

Cold War Redux

Every July, Daniel Silva releases a new Gabriel Allon novel, and for fans that year seems too long a wait.  Silva’s books are politically outspoken and so well-researched, they seem to be happening in real time, sometimes eerily predicting events before they happen.

 His hero is the green-eyed art restorer and Israeli spy, who has risen from assassin to chief of the secret service, but does not shy away from going into the field when required. The Other Woman, is the eighteenth Gabriel Allon book, and a tour de force—deftly blending reality with fiction, so that one of the best known spies of the twentieth century comes alive for the reader.

To recap for those who haven’t encountered Allon before—he was plucked out of art school by his mentor and father figure, Ari Shamron to join a crack team and avenge the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. When he returned, he had aged much beyond his years and also become almost indestructible, although he came close to death several times. He becomes Shamron’s best intelligence officer in the field and also the world’s best restorer of art treasures. During the course of the seventeen earlier books in the series, he lost his infant son in a bomb blast that left his first wife, Leah, in an almost vegetative state. He met and fell in love with fellow intelligence operative Chiara and married her. She gave birth to twins and is temporarily out of action.

In this book and a few of the previous ones, Allon has done no art restoring, but when he did, Silva gave readers a concise history of classic works of European art. His mentor and father figure remains Ari Shamron, his friend and rival is Uri Navot, and with him is his loyal team of spies, computer wizards and destroyers of evil everywhere. The adversary has moved from Islamic terrorism to Russia, and the days of the Cold War return in this book, in more ways than one.

An agent codenamed Heathcliff who was about to defect to the UK is murdered in a street of Vienna, and Allon blamed for it. His life has been threatened any number of times, but with the outrage over this killing, his career is on the line. As he starts to untangle the threads of intrigue, he finds that a Russian mole has buried deep into Britain’s secret service, MI6. The search takes Allon to the height of the Cold War, and a woman living in exile in Andalusia, who holds the key—the other woman of the title.

The novel like all others, is topical, fast-paced and action-packed, with amazing plot twists. If there’s a glitch, it is a bit of contrivance towards the end-- a character takes a somewhat unconvincing detour, when the climax could well have taken place few pages earlier.

As always, Silva’s note at the end, is a chilling reminder of the way the world is going, and why the relations between the US and Russia are a matter of concern-- he doesn’t name the presidents, but it’s obvious who they are. Even those who are not fans of espionage thrillers, will not regret picking up this one—strongly recommended.

The Other Woman

By Daniel Silva

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 496