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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jul 2006, 352 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2007, 500 pages
Monsignor Luigi Donati, the private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, has come to seek Allon's help. A young Swiss guard has been found dead in St. Peter's Basilica, and although Donati has allowed the official inquiry to determine that it is suicide, his instinct tells him that it is murder - and that his master is in grave danger.
A spellbinding tale of power, greed, and revenge from the New York Times-bestselling "world-class paractitioner of spy fiction"
(The Washington Post)
Allon is recovering from a grueling showdown with a Palestinian master terrorist, when a figure from his past arrives in Jerusalem. Monsignor Luigi Donati is the private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, and a man as ruthless as he is intelligent. Now, however, he has come to seek Allon's help. A young Swiss guard has been found dead in St. Peter's Basilica, and although Donati has allowed the official inquiry to determine that it is suicide, his instinct tells him that it is murder-and that his master is in grave danger. He has trusted Allon in the past, and he is the only man he trusts now.
Allon reluctantly agrees to get involved, but once he begins to investigate he concludes that Donati has every right to be concerned, as, following the trail from the heart of the Vatican to the valleys of Switzerland and beyond, he slowly unravels a conspiracy of lies and deception. An extraordinary enemy walks among them, with but one goal: the most spectacular assassination ever attempted.
Filled with remarkable characters and breathtaking double and triple turns of plot, The Messenger solidifies Silva's reputation as his generation's finest writer of international thrillers.
1.
IT WAS ALI MASSOUDI who unwittingly roused Gabriel Allon from his brief and
restless retirement: Massoudi, the great Europhile intellectual and freethinker,
who, in a moment of blind panic, forgot that the English drive on the left side
of the road.
The backdrop for his demise was a rain-swept October evening in Bloomsbury.
The occasion was the final session of the first annual Policy Forum for Peace
and Security in Palestine, Iraq, and Beyond. The conference had been launched
early that morning amid great hope and fanfare, but by day’s end it had taken on
the quality of a traveling production of a mediocre play. Even the demonstrators
who came in hope of sharing some of the flickering spotlight seemed to realize
they were reading from the same tired script. The American president was burned
in effigy at ten. The Israeli prime minister was put to the purifying flame at
eleven. At lunchtime, amid a deluge that briefly turned Russell Square into a
...
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