A Death in Vienna (Gabriel Allon Series #4) » (Abridged)

Daniel Silva is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, Prince of Fire, A Death in Vienna, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules and The Defector. He is married to NBC News Today correspondent Jamie Gangel. They have two children, Lily and Nicholas. In 2009 Silva was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council.

Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

Art restorer and sometime spy Gabriel Allon is sent to Vienna to authenticate a painting, but the real object of his search becomes something else entirely: to find out the truth about the photograph that has turned his world upside down. It is the face of the unnamed man who brutalized his mother in the last days of World War II, during the Death March from Auschwitz. But is it really the same one? If so, who is he? How did he escape punishment? Where is he now? Fueled by an intensity he has not felt in years, Allon cautiously begins to investigate, but the more layers he strips away, the greater the evil that is revealed, a web stretching across sixty years and thousands of lives. Soon, the quest for one monster becomes the quest for many. And the monsters are stirring . . .

Filled with sharply etched characters and prose, and a plot of astonishing intricacy, this is an uncommonly intelligent thriller by one of our very best

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

Given a bit of research, only a very clumsy novelist could not make gripping fiction out of Nazi inhumanity, and Silva is a skillful novelist who does justice to the often heartbreaking material without exploiting it. He has performed a service with his three post-Holocaust novels, but to continue mining that vein might well have limited his growth as a writer. Silva doesn't say whether he will bring back Gabriel Allon, but if he does I hope he will use him to explore the evils of today's world, which, if not always as clear-cut as those of the Holocaust, are no less real.