Stephen Romansky

Daniel Silva was my favorite author until I read this book. If you want to read an exciting and thrilling book you can start with his first Gabriel Allon book, The Kill Artist. That first book was as good as it gets, though I enjoyed all the previous Silva novels I have read, until now. This most recent Allon book, The Cellist, was highly disappointing. I was hoping to get musical insights into a character similar to the way I learned about artistic insights in previous books. Instead the musicality of this book was elementary and disappointing. The entire story was predictable but maybe that’s because I’ve read nine other Allon books, all much more enjoyable than this last attempt by the author. What bothers me, however, is the effort Mr. Silva goes to explain to me what’s been going on in our country the last four years, citing all the leftist lies that I have been hearing since day one of the Trump administration. This is not the format for Silva to use to give me a lesson of his political views - as he sees it! And what he sees are views with serious distortions. I paid for a novel for enjoyment,for escape - not to read liberal political views that I can hear any time I turn on CNN. Of course Silva does acknowledge that his wife, a CNN correspondent, helped him write most of the last 60 pages of this disappointment. Therefore, sadly, I say goodbye to Gabriel Allon, a character I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s just the author who created Allon, that I will NEVER buy again.