Thriller Spotlight with Joel C. Rosenberg

The mystique of the Mossad is legendary.

Sure, I’m proud that the foreign intelligence service of my country, Israel, is widely regarded as one of the most effective spy agencies on the planet. To many who love spy thrillers, the Mossad is supersecret and supercool because it’s super feared by all the right people.

So it’s high time to introduce my readers to Daniel Silva and his Mossad protagonist, Gabriel Allon, in this “Thriller Spotlight.”

Silva started his career as a journalist, working for UPI and then for CNN. But in 1996, he released his first novel, The Unlikely Spy, and it debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2000, he released his fourth book, which was also the first of the Gabriel Allon series. And this brilliant and sly Israeli operative has been Silva’s star ever since, appearing in twenty-one more published adventures.

What I find fascinating is that Gabriel Allon isn’t simply a spy. From the earliest books, he is also an art restorer who uses that profession as a cover for his true day job. And Allon is so good at his tradecraft that over time he rises to become the head of “The Institute.” Many people don’t know that the official name for the Mossad is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.” Since that’s a mouthful, most people simply call it the Mossad since that’s Hebrew for “The Institute.”

Gabriel Allon’s career in espionage began as an assassin in Operation Wrath of God, Israel’s campaign of retribution against the members of the Black September terrorist group who were responsible for the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The path that led him from targeted killer to agency head was circuitous and, most often, reluctant.

Although it’s not his most recent release, my favorite Silva thriller so far—and the one I want to recommend today—is The New Girl. Published in 2019, it is number 19 in the series. As someone who likes to keep my novels close to the real news, and who has spent time in Saudi Arabia with the royal family, this was a particularly fun book for me. The daughter of a very senior Saudi official is kidnapped from an exclusive private school in Switzerland. Running out of time and options and fearing his daughter will be terribly hurt or killed, the Saudi decides he has no other choice to get her back than to turn to the Israeli spymaster, even though the Saudis and Israelis have no diplomatic ties.

So who is this Saudi official in the novel? It turns out to be the crown prince. While at one time the prince, known in the book by the initials “KBM,” was celebrated by the West, his perceived hand in the murder of a critical journalist has made him a pariah. Sound familiar?

You don’t have to work for the Mossad or the CIA to see that Silva picked up the public narrative of the real-life crown prince of the Saudi kingdom—Mohammed bin Salman, known as “MBS”—who is widely thought to have been responsible for the grisly murder of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In real life, there is no proof—not publicly released, anyway—that MBS played any role in Khashoggi’s death or even knew about it advance. In Silva’s fictional scenario, however, KBM is complicit, but that just makes his clandestine alliance with Gabriel Allon all the more risky and intriguing. Just to be clear, Silva wasn’t predicting these events. He wrote The New Girl after the Khashoggi murder. But picking up a major global firestorm and turning it into a fictional spy drama was a fascinating approach.

Having been to Saudi Arabia twice, and having spent hours with the real-life crown prince, I was quickly drawn in. But you needn’t have had an audience with Saudi royalty to get caught up in this tale. And the twists and turns along the way are spellbinding.

Daniel Silva is a master storyteller. His plots are intricate, his action is on point, and the romance some of characters experience is natural and unforced. Perhaps best of all, his humor is often dark, a very Israeli trait for someone born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and reared in Merced, California.

If you haven’t read any of Silva’s books, do yourself a favor and get a copy of The New Girl today.

—Joel C. Rosenberg