Whistling tunelessly to himself, he carried the canvas upstairs to his studio, placed it back on the original stretcher, and covered the painting with a thin coat of yellow-tinted varnish. When the varnish had dried he summoned Sarah and John Boothy to the studio and asked them to choose which canvas was the original, and which was the forgery. After several minutes of careful consideration and consultation, both agreed that the painting on the right was the original, and the one on the left was the forgery.
---Daniel Silva, Moscow Rules, Signet, 2009
I quite like Daniel Silva' novels for reading on a train; this is a compliment, not condescension. Silva's novels have a strong central character -- Gabriel Allon, an art restorer and Israeli spy -- and plenty of adventure in foreign locations including, in this novel, Italy and Russia. The plots are fairly straightforward, lacking in the confusion common in spy and mystery novels, and the prose functional and occasionally elegant. Allon's mission in Moscow Rules is to bring down a Russian arms dealer who is selling missiles to Al-Qaeda and he does this by forging a Mary Cassatt (the details of the forgery being, to me, one of the most interesting parts of the book) to sell to the art-loving wife of the arms dealer. Of course things go wrong and Allon loses the support of the British, American and Israeli intelligence services and ends up on his own, finally being rescued by the deus ex machina of a sympathetic Russian and returning to his new wife in Tuscany.
This novel in the eighth of Silva's seventeen excellent novels (so far) about Gabriel Allon. Technology has considerably changed since Ian Fleming's books about James Bond, though there still is the need for individual heroism in the fight against tyranny and terrorism.
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