Jewish terrorism analyst Solomon Rosner lies dead in a hotel in Amsterdam, and it is Gabriel Allon’s job to sift through Rosner’s files. It’s in doing this that Allon discovers two things:

1. Rosner had requested an emergency meeting with Allon’s employers, Israeli Intelligence, not twenty-four hours before his death.
2. The target is the daughter of an American ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Allon appears seconds to late to save the girl from being brutally kidnapped, but reveals his face to her captors, setting in motion of chain of events that ties Allon forever to the girl and places in his hands the fate of Western Europe.

Dan Silva is routinely hailed as one of the most gifted spy novelists alive, and Gabriel Allon, the art-restorer/part-time spy/”the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence”, is perhaps his best known character. Appearing in no less than seven books so far, Allon has gone to hell and back to give us a thrill, and the seventh, The Secret Servent, is no exception, addressing relevant but touchy issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and the moral boundaries of intelligence and interrogation.

Silva’s been in the news a fair amount this week. NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse says nice things about him here, and Today has , posted the first chapter on its website.