Daniel Silva

Gabriel Allon restores Renaissance paintings for a living and kills for Israeli intelligence, and Silva has kept that contradiction running for over twenty books without it collapsing into a gimmick.

He worked as a journalist covering the Middle East for CNN and United Press International, and the tradecraft and the politics come from that rather than from research alone.

The novels are unusually willing to name real conflicts and real actors, and they have accordingly annoyed people on several sides. The art restoration is not decoration: it is the only thing that puts the character back together between books.