An Inside Job, Silva - B+

       Gabriel Allon is enjoying retirement, living in Venice with Chiara and the children, and working on a Titian restoration. He notices something in the lagoon one afternoon, asks the police to investigate and sure enough, it's a floater. The deceased appears to be a young woman. An inquiry indicates that she was working in the Vatican's art department, and she believed she had found a DaVinci behind the relatively mundane piece she was restoring.  Someone else thinks the painting is a DaVinci because not only is the young woman dead, her apartment has been ransacked, and the painting stolen from the Vatican storage rooms. The Camorra, a Neopolitan gang, is behind the theft and murder. Gabriel tracks the painting to a vault in a sketchy Geneva bank. Knowing that there will be a private sale, Gabriel hatches a plan that involves him painting an exact copy that he will substitute for the original, and having a hacker friend reroute the money paid for the painting. With the assistance of French authorities, the substitution of Gabriel's copy for the original takes place, and with the help of the UK authorities, the ill-gotten monies are sent to Kyiv to help against the Russians.  Gabriel goes on to help the Vatican understand how their bankers were cheating them and how a cardinal had stolen the painting, He helps the Italian Police  arrest a vast proportion of the Camorra, send the disgraced cardinal off to an abbey, and place a Swiss Bank under government supervision. And to top it all off, he dominates the negotiation about the terms of the restoration of the DaVinci.  A few months later, the art world and the entire world cheer Gabriel's work on the newly found DaVinci.

    Another great one by a very talented man. As Daniel Silva is in his mid-sixties, one would conclude there'll be a few more Allon's.  Thus, I need to stop trying to figure out just how old Gabriel is.