A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense.

A suspenseful assassination scene, replete with surprising reversals, caps the chase, with Allon and the Leopard emerging free to stalk and elude each other once again.įamiliar material, for sure, but powered by steady pacing, keen detail, and a strong, ironic finish.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. But when Allon evades the Leopard, Crux Vera targets the Pope himself, who is poised to address a convocation of Jews in Rome. does make for strange bedfellows,’” Katrine, the Leopard’s partner, observes post-tryst). So when Crux Vera discovers that Allon is on their scent, they want him taken out and dispatch the Leopard, a professional assassin who finds that killing whets his appetite for kinky sex (“‘Politics. Crux Vera, a brotherhood secretly operating within the Vatican, will kill to suppress these revelations. Moving from Germany to Italy and England (in a series of sharply observed scenes), Allon learns that Stern, at work on a book, had uncovered information about Pius XII’s trafficking with the Germans during WWII.

They send art restorer and hit man Gabriel Allon ( The Kill Artist, 2000 The English Assassin, p. Investigators there blame neo-Nazis, but Israel’s secret intelligence agency thinks something more sinister is afoot. First, someone murders Professor Benjamin Stern in Munich. To widely held suspicions that Pope Pius XII was complicit in the Holocaust, Silva adds a compelling premise: What if Pope John Paul’s successor, here the fictional Pope Paul VII, made information public proving that Pius XII and the Vatican colluded with the Nazis? (The author notes in a postscript that the Vatican Secret Archives, currently sealed off to historians, may house documents that verify the alleged collaboration.) A swirl of intrigue, pursuit, and assassination is set spinning in the wake of Paul VII’s threat.

Another polished and entertaining thriller from the prolific Silva, this one tracking dark secrets in Vatican City.

Daniel silva the kill artist review