The English Girl

My latest book from the library is The English Girl: A Novel by Daniel Silva. Here's the blurb at Amazon ...

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2013: The setup: A beautiful woman is snatched from her vacation on Corsica. A ransom note reaches 10 Downing Street. An ambitious, unfaithful prime minister seriously needs a fixer. Which leads his fixers to art restorer and Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, one of the more believable and likable heroes in recent spy fiction. To call The English Girl a page turner is an oversimplification. Smart, unpredictable, and packed with bits of history, art, heart, and imagination, this is a page turner to be savored. Let me just say that I like John LeCarre. Big fan. Still impressively relevant and prolific into his 80s. But the torch must pass to someone. And it’s been a while since I grabbed anyone by the lapels and said, “Read this now,” so let me strongly suggest that you take The English Girl to the beach, or wherever summer may take you. Daniel Silva isn’t quite LeCarre. He’s a more modern breed, with some major DNA overlap. (Other DNA-sharing: Graham Greene, Joseph Kanon, Alan Furst.) When it comes to the vast club of practitioners of international spycraft, Silva is a cut above them all, and The English Girl is a masterwork. --Neal Thompson

I've read all of the books in the series and this one is pretty good. As usual, it's set in interesting places like Corsica and Aix-en-Provence (Aix Cathedral), and you spend some time at 10 Downing Street. You can take a neat virtual tour of the rooms of 10 Downing Street, and here's a screen capture of the room in which Gabriel and the Prime Minister meet, the White Drawing Room ...