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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2005, 384 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2006, 400 pages
Gabriel Allon's team successfully track down the terrorists who bombed the Israeli embassy in Rome; but when they do the plot takes a stunning twist, putting their lives and those of hundreds of innocent bystanders at risk.
Gabriel Allon faces his most determined enemy—and greatest challenge—in the stunning new novel from the "world-class practitioner of spy fiction" (The Washington Post)
Few recent thriller writers have excited the kind of critical praise that Daniel Silva has, with his novels featuring art restorer and sometime spy Gabriel Allon.
Now Allon is back in Venice, when a terrible explosion in Rome leads to a disturbing personal revelation: the existence of a dossier in the hands of terrorists that strips away his secrets, lays bare his history. Hastily recalled home to Israel, drawn once more into the heart of a service he had once forsaken, Gabriel Allon finds himself stalking an elusive master terrorist across a landscape drenched in generations of blood, along a trail that keeps turning in upon itself, until, finally, he can no longer be certain who is stalking whom. And when at last the inevitable showdown comes, it's not Gabriel alone who is threatened with destruction--for it is not his history alone that has been laid bare.
A knife-edged thriller of astonishing intricacy and feeling, filled with exhilarating prose, this is Daniel Silva's finest novel yet.
Excerpt
Prince of Fire
THERE HAD BEEN WARNING SIGNS - THE SHABBAT bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that left eighty-seven people dead; the bombing of an Istanbul synagogue, precisely one year later, that killed another twenty-eight-but Rome would be his coming-out party, and Rome would be the place where he left his calling card.
Afterward, within the corridors and executive suites of Israel's vaunted intelligence service, there was considerable and sometimes belligerent debate over the time and place of the conspiracy's genesis. Lev Ahroni, the ever-cautious director of the service, would claim that the plot was hatched not long after the Israeli army knocked down Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah and stole his secret files. Ari Shamron, the legendary Israeli master spy, would find this almost laughable, though Shamron often disagreed with Lev simply as a matter of sport. Only Shamron, who had fought with the Palmach during the War of Independence ...
Daniel Silva's Bibliography
First novel, featuring Alfred Vicary, a brilliant but bumbling
professor, set in WWII
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