The Unsettling Exploits of Daniel Silva’s Mossad Super Spy

Thrillers are good beach reading because, like the beach, they are supposed to provide a vacation from real life. The hero is quicker, smarter, and stronger than any real secret agent; the villain, more ingeniously villainous. But most important, the hero is supposed to win: He stops the ticking time bomb, thwarts the terrorist, rescues the girl. This is a comforting antidote to the way the world works—especially lately—because in reality, the bad guys very often get away with it. Every successful suicide bombing is a thriller gone wrong.

Which is why Daniel Silva’s latest blockbuster, The Black Widow, makes for such unsettling summer reading. This book was my first acquaintance with Silva and with his hero, the master Israeli spy Gabriel Allon, who has starred in more than a dozen novels. But since it is full of call-backs to Allon’s previous adventures, I already feel I know him pretty well. He got his start as a spy and assassin when he was assigned to hunt down the Palestinian terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. (In real life, this was one of Ehud Barak’s most fabled exploits.) He roamed Europe from Cornwall to Vienna, lost a son to a terrorist car-bomb, and now, in his 60s, has a second family with his young Italian wife. As if his prowess with a gun wasn’t enough, he is equally adept with a paint brush: Allon is a brilliant restorer of artworks, and in The Black Widow we first see him working at the Israel Museum, touching up a Caravaggio. (In this he owes something to Yigael Yadin, the general-turned-archeologist, just as his name is borrowed from another great Israeli military figure, Yigal Allon.)

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