The New Girl

Author Daniel Silva notes before starting his latest Gabriel Allon novel that he was writing one account of a fictional crowned prince of Saudi Arabia when news concerning the real crowned prince changed his storyline.

Modeled on the real Mohammed bin Salman, Silva was writing about a fictional Saudi crowned prince who was finding popularity and success worldwide. Until the real-world killing of journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi spurred Silva to change the storyline.

In the fiction of “The New Girl,” similar to the real world, the Saudi prince is implicated in the death of a journalist and dissident. In the novel, the prince’s daughter is kidnapped and the prince reaches out to a natural enemy to save her – Gabriel Allon, legendary spy and chief of Israeli intelligence.

While Silva taps into a few details of recent news events, the overall arc of “The New Girl” is completely fiction.

Silva has written about two dozen books featuring Gabriel Allon. “The New Girl” follows the direction of the novels that have come before – a series with the intelligence of a John Le Carre spy novel with the dash of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.

Gabriel Allon is a fascinating character – a reluctant though master spy. A talented and classically trained artist, he’d rather be painting or restoring canvases by the masters but instead he finds himself as the chief of Israeli intelligence, a position that has not kept him from the field.

He remains an action-adventure hero despite his executive position and his apparent age. 

Given the history Silva supplies for Allon, the character must be in his late 60s or even early 70s. The author never mentions Allon’s specific age though there are many references that he’s grown old in the service. And one need only count the decades from the time Allon was first recruited as an Israeli agent.

None of this ruins the appeal of the series or the recently released novel.

“The New Girl” is a page-turner for an old spy who seems eternally active.