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Apr 18, 2018gogo12127 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Four months after the deadliest attack on the American homeland since 9/11,  a terrorist plot leaves a trail of carnage through London’s glittering West End. The attack is a brilliant feat of planning and secrecy but with one loose thread. The thread leads Gabriel Allon and his team to the south of France and to the gilded doorstep of one of the richest men in the country, Jean-Luc Martel, and his companion, Olivia Watson. A beautiful former British fashion model, Olivia pretends not to know the true source of Martel’s enormous wealth. Martel, likewise, turns a blind eye to the fact he is doing business with a man whose objective is the very destruction of the West. Together, under Gabriel’s skilled hand, they will become an unlikely pair of heroes in the global war on terrorism. (Description slightly edited from the author's website.) I initially thought that House of Spies was a lesser effort by Daniel Silva. I thought that here we go again, the same old kind of plot, same old Gabriel Allon team members. At least I thought that for a good part of the first half of the book. Then the narrative picked up steam, I once again found the plot and characters, old and new, interesting and I became engrossed throughout the remainder of the novel. I think my initial reaction might have been because I had other things going on in my life, and these things intruded on my reading process. Whatever. One thing I've noticed when I read a Gabriel Allon novel is that I have to keep an atlas handy, because Silva introduces place names that sometimes are somewhat unfamiliar to me. Sometimes the places are so obscure that I have to resort to Wikipedia.