kill artist

Daniel Silva's first Gabriel Allon book is called The Kill Artist. As I mentioned in my last post, my wife has decided to go back and read all of Daniel Silva's works, and has collected them in paperback from a variety of sources. A quick look through 'The Books' page here on the blog tells me that the first one I read was in 2013, which I bought in a tiny English language section of a bookstore in Sulmona, Italy. there's my blog, doing its job as intended. thank me very much

After reading this one, I read a second, which I just finished. I'll write about that one in a little while, but I am going to hold off on the Silva books for a while as my library has re-opened--a little while ago actually, but has just recently returned to regular hours so I can go over there after work. Which I have now done, and I now have a few books lined up that don't have Silva's name on them.

Allon is a great character for a variety of reasons, including his reluctance to do what he knows needs to be done, his haunted past, his professionalism, his humanity (in spite of what he does) and his weaknesses and fallibility. When I spell it out like that, it sounds a lot like the advice the give writers on what makes up a good hero, so I guess Silva has been listening. I thought that going back to book one would be like an origin story, but it isn't. I hope that's not too much of a spoiler, but its seems to me that that story hasn't been told yet, except as background. But who knows, maybe it in one of the others I haven't read yet.