House of Spies

Even though it's the 17th outing of Gabriel Allon, the anticipation for this book remains high. It starts off on a promising note – five hundred dead in three separate but coordinated attacks in the West End of London. Adrian Carter is working in conjunction with MI5 to identify the players even though there is no doubt that the mastermind is Saladin – the same one behind the attacks in Washington DC at the end of the previous book. The trail leads to a Moroccan-French drug dealer and here enters Gabriel – the newly minted ramsad of the Office who has to smooth things with French intelligence to figure out where the trail leads to. It ends at a French hotelier billionaire, friends with the Prime Minister but rumored to be a drug dealer.

Here starts the story that readers are all too familiar with – coerce/convince the Frenchman and his girlfriend to cooperate and finally help the team in a clandestine operation leading right to Saladin. The ending is good but quite simplistic too, still enjoyable. The idea that the chief of an intelligence agency would personally shoot and kill a terrorist mastermind is unthinkable in the real world but we can expect nothing less from Gabriel. Even though this series is becoming quite repetitive in the last couple of books, it's still difficult to put down because Gabriel remains the killer with a conscience – the Prince of Fire.