First in the Gabriel Allon series
First published in 2000
425 pages
My rating: 3 out of 5
Image from Goodreads
Gabriel Allon -- a former assassin for Israeli intelligence -- lives a quiet life as a highly sought-after art restorer. But a special job and an old enemy bring him out of retirement in this spy thriller, which, sadly, didn't really thrill me at all.
I kept expecting this to become a major page-turner, but the story never did grip me. I had to force myself to keep reading and I did a decent amount of skimming along the way. The book was written 15 years ago and the its major topics -- the Israel/Palestine conflict and Middle East terrorism -- have obviously changed a lot since then. I also thought the writing was bogged down with unnecessary descriptions and non-essential information. It definitely could've been 100 pages shorter.
I became interested in reading the Gabriel Allon series after seeing some of the newer books in the series come through the library where I work (like the brand-new release "The English Spy"), and I figured I might as well start at the beginning. I'm glad I did, so I have Gabriel's background info, but I'm now planning to skip ahead to the more recent books in the series.
P.S. What is up with the awful cover? That strange partial image of a face has no bearing on the story at all. Ugh!
Ugh, misleading covers are the worst! Even worse than ugly covers.
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