Saturday, July 31, 2010

The Defector by Daniel Silva


Daniel Silva starts The Defector with the best first sentence hook I’ve ever read: “Pyotr Luzkhov was about to be killed and for that he was grateful.” This starts an action-packed, page-turning spy thriller. The Associated Press called it the perfect book for fans of well-crafted thrillers, which is a pretty big compliment but The Defector delivers. It hooks the reader in from the first sentence and doesn’t leg to until the last.

Silva’s main character Gabriel Allon is an Israeli spy/assassin, who’s enjoying solitude with his wife and restoring painting masterpieces for the Vatican. He once made a promise to a colleague and friend Grigori Bulganov, a Russian spy who once saved Gabriel’s life. He promised Bulganov not to let him be killed and buried in an unmarked grave.

Now the Russian has disappeared several years after defecting to England. The British Government thinks he’s re-defected back to Russia but Gabriel knows better. Grigori would never return to his home country for fear of being killed the moment he set foot on Russian soil. Gabriel gathers a multi-national team of operatives to find Grigori and punish the ones responsible for his abduction.

As they bounce around the world, money is no object and the players in the game involve the highest levels of government in Washington, DC, London, Tel Aviv and the Kremlin. The further Gabriel goes to find his friend, he realizes that he may lose much more.

Silva has a great knack to pull you into a story and make you feel and empathize with the characters. Gabriel Allon seems to be a bit cliché, an assassin with a heart of gold, but Silva doesn’t sugarcoat anyone. No one is innocent. Still you’re drawn into their stories and connect with them. He makes it easy to know who to cheer for.

Silva doesn’t include many Americans in this novel. In fact, only two have important roles but remain secondary characters. He even takes a couple of pot shots at Americans. However, it seems he’s laughing with us, not at us. Hmm….

This is the first novel I’ve read by Daniel Silva and it has wet my appetite for more of his works. Its breath-taking pace doesn’t leave the reader out of breath or out of touch. It soars but remains grounded without becoming so far-fetched the readers are reminded they’re reading a work of fiction.

Read the first page of The Defector and then hang on. You’ll want to read it in one sitting.

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