AN INSIDE JOB

5 stars out of 5

I enjoyed this, the 25th installment of the series featuring my all-time favorite male character in a book series more, I believe, than any of the 24 that came before it - and as far as I know, I haven't missed a single one. I'll admit I read it following a book that had so many grammatical and content errors that I can't believe it got past publishing house editors, and perhaps that did influence my appreciation of this one a bit. In any event, the contrast really underscored how wonderful it is to read a story that's well-written, engrossing and entertaining. And for sure this one is all that and more.

Even though the star of the show, Gabriel Allon, no longer officially plies his trade as a well-known and successful Mossad spy, his legend continues. These days, he practices his unmatched talent as a restorer of art (not only does he "fix" damaged artwork by the old masters, he can copy their style so well that experts can't tell his painting isn't an original). As he and his beautiful wife Chiara and their twins Raphael and Irene live the good life, he's been working on the restoration of a very important one. That work gets rudely interrupted, however, with his discovery of a dead woman in the waters of the Venetian Lagoon. That, in turn, leads him inside the walls of the Vatican, where a painting thought to be a lost DaVinci - which could be worth many millions of dollars - somehow disappeared.

Soon it's clear that the painting could not have gone missing without help from the inside. Since Gabriel is good friends with the Pope (he played an instrumental role in his election, in fact), the two meet up quite often. Mind you, I'm not Catholic, but I loved the late Pope Francis and the current Pope Leo XIV). Gabriel's good buddy, though, turns out to be an absolute delight - every interaction between the two brought a smile to my face (despite concern that either or both will make it out of the book alive).

The rest of the story, of course, serves up details on how they plan to get the painting back, what really happened to the dead woman and who the bad guys and gals are. It's the usual suspense and action, but also to my great delight it brings together several familiar characters from previous books and puts a bit brighter spotlight on Gabriel's delightful 9-year-olds.

All good things must come to an end, of course, and already I'm chomping at the bit for the next adventure. After all these years, Gabriel may be getting a little long in the tooth and tries his best to avoid the kind of dangerous cloak-and-dagger situations that earned him his stellar reputation as a spy. But he certainly hasn't lost his edge - if anything, he's become all the more interesting. 

An Inside Job by Daniel Silva (Harper, July 2025); 415 pp.