The Heist

In The Heist, Daniel Silva once again wraps a taut thriller around his favorite character, Gabriel Allon, a renowned art restorer who secretly is an Israeli spymaster and sometime assassin. When a good friend is charged with the grisly murder of a former British spy turned stolen-art trafficker, Allon can save him only by tracking down the real killers and, in the bargain, finding one of the world's most famous stolen paintings, Caravaggio's late masterwork “Nativity With St. Francis and St. Lawrence,” stolen in 1969. Things take on new and disturbing meaning when Allon discovers that the dead man's primary client, and the likely holder of the Nativity, is the brutal dictator of Syria. He's unnamed in the story, but he's clearly Bashar al-Assad, and he's collecting stolen masterpieces to build up his wealth as a hedge against losing power. Allon devises a brilliant but risky scheme to retrieve the painting; he and his crew of Israeli commandos are assisted by a young Syrian woman who survived the 1982 massacre in Hama and welcomes the opportunity to avenge the deaths of her family members. It's a genre novel, but also exceptionally well written and researched, and Silva's characters are nuanced and nicely drawn.