The One with A Death In Vienna

178. Title & Author: A Death in Vienna by Daniel Silva (403 pages)

Genre: Fiction—Action & Thriller

Completed: 28 March 2011

Summary & Review:

After a bomb goes off in the Wartime Claims and Inquiries office in Vienna, an organization that researches thefts and other crimes committed against Jews during WWII, Israeli spy/Art restorer Gabriel Allon travels to Austria to investigate. He discovers that the bombing was planned by a former high-ranking SS officer who has been living in Vienna under an assumed identity. As Allon delves into the mystery of this former Nazi, he discovers that his link to this man is more personal than he ever could have imagined: here was the SS man who murdered two of his mother’s dearest friends in front of her as they were marched out of the Birkenau death camp.

As Silva mentions in the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, this book was the third in a cycle of Gabriel Allon books dealing with WWII and the Holocaust. He explored Nazi art looting and the complicit role that Swiss banks played—and continue to play—in hiding stolen Jewish wealth in The English Assassin (#136), and he condemned the silence of the Catholic Church during the war in The Confessor (#159). This novel focused on both the desperate desire of Austria to pretend they were nothing more than victims during the war and the role of both the Catholic Church and countries such as Argentina in sheltering and hiding Nazis after the war. Silva makes his opinions on these matters very clear throughout the book.

The first half of the book was very much a standard, action-packed Gabriel Allon spy novel. But, as Silva shifted his focus more to a narrative of what occurred during and after the Second World War, the tone of the novel completely changed. Even with the fairly abrupt change, I still very much enjoyed the second half of the book and found the historical detail included therein to be extremely interesting. Silva, and this Gabriel Allon series in general, continues to be a favorite of mine in the contemporary spy-novel genre.

It’s about time that I finished another book! I think I was going through withdrawals. But, with how busy school has been this semester coupled with a bouncing baby boy, there just hasn’t been much time to read. I have, however, been able to listen to a couple of audiobooks, including the pretty good, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes, and the pretty terrible, The Judas Strain by James Rollins.

Rating: 8.0