The English Spy – Frankly, I did not find the last two or three of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels to be up to his very high standard. However, whatever faults they had, The English Spy more than makes up for in spades. It’s is one of his very best — a complex, fast moving, character driven page-turner that
continues and advances plot threads in a number of the recent books. As such, it brings back most of Allon’s old enemies, the Russians, the IRA, and the Iranians, as well as his old friends and allies. It also sweeps us back through familiar settings in London, the rocky coast of Cornwall, Belfast, “Bandit Country ” in Northern Ireland, Vienna, Lisbon, Corsica, Hamburg, and Israel, with lots of gunshots and bomb blasts in between. There’s enough story and real-world geopolitics in this book to provide four or five novels if he had wanted to structure it that way. Instead, Silva provides a roller coaster you really can’t miss, if you’re one of his big fans, which I am.
The author is obviously a strong supporter of Israel, and provides a very accurate picture of what’s happening in the Middle East today, particularly regarding Iran. It’s interesting to note that all of Allon’s closest allies are Brits. They are the story, as are the Russians in the Iranians. Nowhere in this mix, do we find a single American politician or spy, and Silva does not pull his punches about the current American administration, the mess it has created in the Middle East, and the simple fact that they have become both incompetent and irrelevant. That’s not fiction, and few people who have followed events over the last five years or so, could do anything but agree. But politics or not, The English Spy a great suspense novel. While Silva wraps up a number of plot threads, he leaves enough others alive and kicking to make us hope the next one be just as good as The English Spy.
William F Brown is the author of eight of his own action, suspense novels on Kindle, the latest of which are Burke’s War and Burke’s Gamble. See the book review tab on my website for more book reviews.
