A Death in Vienna

Gabriel soon learns that a man named Max Klein had set the events in motion that may have led to the bombing. Klein had once been a violinist in the Auschwitz camp orchestra and he had a particularly vivid memory of a Nazi named Erich Radek. In front of Klein, Radek once killed fifteen concentration camp prisoners in cold blood when they could not correctly identify a musical piece by Brahms. Many years later, Klein spots this same war criminal placidly having coffee in a Viennese cafe, and he reports what he has seen to Eli Lavon, who then begins to make the inquiries that almost cost him his life. Gabriel's investigation leads him to make some horrifying discoveries, the most painful one being the heart-rending story of his mother's two years of hell as an inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Silva writes with great feeling about the harrowing events of the Holocaust and the culpability of those who helped the Nazis escape punishment after the war ended. In addition, Silva convincingly makes the point that radical right-wing political parties still pose a serious threat around the world, and that we must do everything in our power to protect our civil liberties in the face of these extremists. "A Death in Vienna" is fast-paced, compelling, and filled with intriguing twists and turns. It is a worthy, well-researched, and thought-provoking conclusion to Silva's excellent trilogy.


Far From the Best   April 13, 2004
Patrick Devenny (New Jersey)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful

Daniel Silva is the best thriller/espionage writer going today. He is a wizard at constructing nuanced plots that both entertain and surprise even the most veteran of thriller readers. His characters are delightfully dark and mysterious, but deep enough that the reader honestly cares about their trials and tribulations. It is a world of deceit and brutal statecraft, where only the truly underhanded survive. Perhaps it is to his disadvantage that Mr. Silva masters the shady world of espionage fiction so well that any deviation from perfection seems like a fall off. Were it by another author, A Death in Vienna would be a powerful work, but, with circumstances as they are, the book represents an inferior Silva effort.

A Death in Vienna leaves off where The Confessor ended, with the art restorer/Mossad hitman Gabriel Allon in Europe. Fresh off his discovery of long secret Nazi-Vatican ties, Allon is quickly brought back into action as an old friend is mysteriously attacked by a bomb wielding killer. Tasked by his mentor and tormentor, Ari Shamron, to finding the killer, Allon quickly becomes embroiled in a much wider conspiracy. Stories are told, witnesses are silenced, and Allon himself is targeted. Gabriel soon takes his search for the truth over three continents, only to find the truth of the entire situation lies in his own memory, and the story of his mother.

A Death in Vienna is the end of the so called "Holocaust" portion of Allon's life. As it turns out, the ghosts of the past are not as buried as we would like. A new power is rising in Hitler's ancestral country, Austria, and it is not exactly friendly to the Jewish people. The force's backers are a dark lot, but one in particular stands out. He is a powerful figure with a past of unimaginable violence, directly related Allon's mother's experiences. He, and others, will do anything it takes to make sure Allon and his allies never reveal the truth. In this effort, they will employ the services of the Clockmaker, a man who shares his time between twin loves; repairing antique clocks and killing people. Even broader forces want the truth to lay dormant, people that Allon once thought friends. Allon will have to employ every tactic he has ever learned in bringing down this legendary evil.

As every Silva story does, it sounds great on the surface. However, several failings really hurt this work in my eyes. The paramount problem is the predictability of the whole story. Nothing is really surprising, everything is pretty much given to the reader early on. The opposition is a fairly sorry lot, never living up to their graphically chronicled wartime atrocity. Even the meticulous killer, the Clockmaker never lives up to the mechanical ferocity somewhat inherent in his nom de guerre. By the end of the story, you really lose any malice or care you had for the various characters, as the plot seems to follow a very by the book approach. On the other hand, Allon is a wonderful character, and his relationship with Shamron is fascinating to read. Every great hero needs a great villain, an addition absent in this book. A Death in Vienna is an enjoyable read, but it lacks that real punch that Silva offers in such books as The Marching Season and The Confessor. Still, I wait impatiently for the next installment of the series!


Disappointed   September 7, 2005
Greg Byrne (Australia)
13 out of 18 found this review helpful

Deep dark secrets from Nazi Germany, the Catholic Church and the Israelis always attract me, but this one fell disappointingly flat. Silva has really done his research, although it seems at times that he is just throwing out detail about villages, smells etc for the sake of it, to show that he HAD done his research.

There were quite a few instances where he over-explained actions to the reader: X, because he had done this, did that, because Y wanted him to do it. I suppose I'm used to writers like Le Carre, who was a craftsman, and who forced the readers to think carefully, who doled out enough info to tantalise, but not so much that the climax was spelled out. Silva, while he has some nice turns of phrase and scene, is competent at this genre, but is by no means in Le Carre's class. The climax was obvious by the halfway point (and was well and truly signposted at regular intervals thereafter), and although a few minor twists intervened, the only time my interest was stirred was the border crossing with Radek anaesthetised in the back of the car. The rest of the pacing was at a plod.

The characters were stereotyped, the providential events (having coffee with the Pope's private secretary was one) strained my credulity and were it not for the cleanness of the prose, I would have put the book down midway through.

I won't be reading any other of Silva's books, which is a shame, as the content of his novels sounds interesting. It's just the delivery that lets it down.


Daniel Silva closes his trilogy with the best of three....   March 12, 2004
L. Quido (Tampa, FL United States)
11 out of 15 found this review helpful

Daniel Silva is the author of six prior espionage thrillers; his newest is the third in a trilogy that explorse various phases of the aftermath of the Holocaust. His centerpiece, art restorer Mario Delvecchio, is, in reality, an agent of the Israeli government named Gabriel Allon. In the prior two novels, "The English Assassin" and "The Confessor", the collaboration of the Swiss bankers and the Vatican, in the aftermath of the world's worst act of genocide, are explored in modern-day settings.

Allon is the instrument of atonement that brings the past to light in each of the first two books, and his role is similar in "A Death in Vienna". A fierce and violent act, the bombing of The Wartime Claims and Inquiries office in Vienna, opens the novel. With two young girls dead and the head of the Claims office, Eli Levon, in a coma, Allon has no choice but to travel back to a city he would prefer to forget -- the city where his own wife and child were victims of a bomb some years before.

Allon's meeting with a Holocaust survivor, Max Klein, leads him to suspect an Austrian business mogul, Erich Radek. Lavon has been investigating Radek's ties to the Nazis based on Klein's account of a cold-blooded killing he witnessed. Radek has a new name, and his credentials have been washed through the CIA, and a red herring escape to Argentina.

The depth of this novel, compared to its predecessors, is in the personal tie in that Allon finds of Radek to his own mother, who barely survived two years in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Through her artwork, and the record of her testimony kept at Yad Vishem, the Israeli memorial center for Holocaust research, Allon learns the startling truth, that Radek, acting as the director of Aktion 1005, had an altercation with his mother on what has come to be known as the Death March from Birkenau.

In his mother's testimony:

"It has been twelve years. Not a day passes that I don't see the faces of Rachel and Sarah -- and the face of the man who murdered them. Their death's weigh heavily on me....on the anniversary of their murders, I say mourner's kaddish for them. I do this out of habit but not faith. I lost my faith in God in Birkenau."

The difficulty, and the importance, of Radek to modern-day Austria is in his blood ties to the strongest candidate for the chancellorship of the Austrian nation. Given his position, and the anti-Semitism that still flares in modern-day Austria, it is tempting for Allon's handlers to simply expose Radek; but in the end, Allon's plan to kidnap him and return him to Israel is the path that is chosen.

Daniel Silva has exactly the right spirit for his material. A consummate journalist, he ties his fictional account into true events - his research is impeccable. In spare and tense prose, he moves a large group of characters around an obstacle, developing subplots that are as complex as Allon's travel schedule. He is unafraid to tie in the Swiss banking complex, the Vatican and the CIA into the intended/unintended passage of Nazi war criminals into modern society, without the punishment they deserved, and without making reparations to the families of those they slaughtered.

The Aktion 1005 effort, under which the Nazis unearthed poorly disguised graves of Holocaust victims and destroyed the evidence in a systematic effort, was tied to famous Austrian criminal Paul Blobel, who was convicted and hanged at Nuremburg. Blobel went to his grave without ever revealing the details of Aktion 1005. It is not a stretch for Silva to set his stage with a fictional character who played a pivotal role in the coverup, much of which remains a mystery today.

Silva deserves his following; his plotting resonates with the readers, his action scenes and dialogue are compelling. He exposes the hidden Vienna and the haven that war criminals found in Argentina in the same way he has pointed it out in Munich, and in the Vatican. He accomplishes his goal of a well-paced and intricate thriller, interspersed with just enough history to make sure that we never forget.

Superb.