''The English Spy'' is the fifteenth in
Daniel Silva's
Gabriel Allon Gabriel Allon is the main protagonist in Daniel Silva's thriller and espionage series that focuses on Israeli intelligence. The main characters refer to their employer as 'the Office', although it is not specified that it is Mossad (known internal ...
series.
[ It was released on June 30, 2015, and reached the top of the '']New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' bestseller list on July 19.
Plot, background, place in series
In an elaborate plot to lure Gabriel Allon into a trap, an English royal princess is killed by a bomb. The princess's life story includes elements based on that of Princess Diana
Diana, Princess of Wales (born Diana Frances Spencer; 1 July 1961 – 31 August 1997) was a member of the British royal family. She was the first wife of King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) and mother of Princes William and Harry. Her ac ...
(who died in 1997), as Silva points out in his "Author's Note," but, as he also notes, the bombing of a royal personage on a boat is based on the 1979 death of Lord Mountbatten
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (25 June 1900 – 27 August 1979) was a British naval officer, colonial administrator and close relative of the British royal family. Mountbatten, who was of German ...
at the hands of the IRA.[See also ] The plot is engineered by the Russian government in vengeance for Allon's interference with their plans in ''The English Girl'' (2013).
The bomber is a former Real IRA
The Real Irish Republican Army, or Real IRA (RIRA), is a dissident Irish republican paramilitary group that aims to bring about a United Ireland. It formed in 1997 following a split in the Provisional IRA by dissident members, who rejected the ...
member who turns out to have been a friend of the Palestinian bomber who, about 25 years earlier, killed Allon's son, so the pursuit becomes personal for him. Silva notes that the history of his fictional bomber is based on the careers of real ex-IRA bombers who taught their skills to various terrorists in the Muslim world.[Mike Barnicle]
"Mike Barnicle with best-selling novelist Daniel Silva on Morning Joe (1 July 2015)"
See also Silva's "Author's Note" to ''The English Spy''. This relationship between bombers links ''The English Spy'' to the first Allon novel, ''The Kill Artist'' (2000) in which Allon avenges his son's death.
The "English spy" of the book's title is Christopher Keller, who was the eponymous ''English Assassin'' of the second book in the Allon series (2002), and who accompanied Allon on his operations in ''The English Girl'' (2013) and ''The Heist'' (2014). In this book, Keller confronts old enemies from his stint in Northern Ireland as a member of the SAS Regiment. At the end, Keller agrees to renounce his life as an expatriate gun-for-hire and join MI6
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
. Gabriel Allon becomes the father of twins and is on the verge of becoming the director of the Israeli Intelligence Services.
References
External links
''The English Spy''
Novels by Daniel Silva
2015 American novels
HarperCollins books
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