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A deadly bomb goes off in the Wartime Claims and Inquiries office in Vienna. Two people end up in the morgue, one man in Intensive Care. The incident brings art restorer Mario Delvecchio away from his work in Venice to investigate who is behind it. There, he resumes his activities as Gabriel Allon, master Israeli spy (first introduced in THE KILL ARTIST). He wants to find whoever is responsible for the attack as much as his mentor/master, Shamron, and the rest of his Mossad colleagues, especially when he realizes that the man in the hospital is an old and dear friend.
Gabriel begins a careful scrutiny of the past, which sends ripples throughout central Europe --- indeed, across several continents. In the course of working to solve who is behind the bombing, he encounters an old man whose picture (at least) he knows he has seen before --- an old man who evokes terrible memories and whose past is linked to the Nazi death camps. It becomes Gabriel's mission to bring this man to justice, as much for personal reasons as to balance the scales for the murdered and maimed of the camps.
Despite Gabriel's near-impossible travel schedule and his encounters with a seemingly bottomless cast of characters, Daniel Silva's latest work reads quickly. The sheer number of characters (several with at least one alias) seemed cumbersome at times, but the pace remained lively. Even the flashback to the Nazi roundup of hundreds of thousands of Jews --- recounted through the testimony of one courageous woman who miraculously survived --- at first seemed to be a distracting side trip, but actually stepped up the story's flow.
Silva does not sugarcoat these horrible times in our world's history. The agony and inhumanity pulse on every page. It's a story that needs to be told so they are not forgotten. And now, with A DEATH IN VIENNA, the last in the Holocaust series, Silva has done just that, completing the circle he began in THE CONFESSOR and THE ENGLISH ASSASSIN. Taken together or as stand-alone novels, they are worthy additions to the libraries of thriller fans everywhere.
--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers
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