The Kill Artist (Gabriel Allon Series #1)

The Kill Artist (Gabriel Allon Series #1)

by Daniel Silva
The Kill Artist (Gabriel Allon Series #1)

The Kill Artist (Gabriel Allon Series #1)

by Daniel Silva

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Overview

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Other Woman comes the first novel in the thrilling series featuring legendary assassin Gabriel Allon.

Immersed in the quiet, meticulous life of an art restorer, former Israeli intelligence operative Gabriel Allon keeps his past well behind him. But now he is being called back into the game—and teamed with an agent who hides behind her own mask...as a beautiful fashion model.  

Their target: a cunning terrorist on one last killing spree, a Palestinian zealot who played a dark part in Gabriel’s past. And what begins as a manhunt turns into a globe-spanning duel fueled by both political intrigue and deep personal passions...

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781440627903
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/06/2004
Series: Gabriel Allon Series
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 512
Sales rank: 8,069
File size: 576 KB

About the Author

About The Author
Daniel Silva is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, and the Gabriel Allon series, including The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, The Defector, The Rembrandt Affair, Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Heist, The English Spy, The Black Widow, and House of Spies. His books are published in more than thirty countries and are bestsellers around the world.

Date of Birth:

1960

Place of Birth:

Michigan

Read an Excerpt

By coincidence Timothy Peel arrived in the village the same week in July as the stranger. He and his mother moved into a ramshackle cottage at the head of the tidal creek with her latest lover, a struggling playwright named Derek, who drank too much wine and detested children. The stranger arrived two days later, settling into the old foreman’s cottage just up the creek from the oyster farm.

Peel had little to do that summer—when Derek and his mother weren’t making clamorous love, they were taking inspirational forced marches along the cliffs—so he determined to find out exactly who the stranger was and what he was doing in Cornwall. Peel decided the best way to begin was to watch. Because he was eleven, and the only child of divorced parents, Peel was well schooled in the art of human observation and investigation. Like any good surveillance artist, he required a fixed post. He settled on his bedroom window, which had an unobstructed view over the creek. In the storage shed he found a pair of ancient Zeiss binoculars, and at the village store he purchased a small notebook and ballpoint pen for recording his watch report.

The first thing Peel noticed was that the stranger liked old objects. His car was a vintage MG roadster. Peel would watch from his window as the man hunched over the motor for hours at a time, his back poking from beneath the bonnet. A man of great concentration, Peel concluded. A man of great mental endurance.

After a month the stranger vanished. A few days passed, then a week, then a fortnight. Peel feared the stranger had spotted him and taken flight. Bored senseless without the routine of watching, Peel got into trouble. He was caught hurling a rock though the window of a tea shop in the village. Derek sentenced him to a week of solitary confinement in his bedroom.

But that evening Peel managed to slip out with his binoculars. He walked along the quay, past the stranger’s darkened cottage and the oyster farm, and stood at the point where the creek fed into the Helford River, watching the sailboats coming in with the tide. He spotted a ketch heading in under power. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and studied the figure standing at the wheel.

The stranger had come back to Port Navas.

The ketch was old and badly in need of restoration, and the stranger cared for it with the same devotion he had shown his fickle MG. He toiled for several hours each day: sanding, varnishing, painting, polishing brass, changing lines and canvas. When the weather was warm he would strip to the waist. Peel couldn’t help but compare the stranger’s body with Derek’s. Derek was soft and flabby; the stranger was compact and very hard, the kind of man you would quickly regret picking a fight with. By the end of August his skin had turned nearly as dark as the varnish he was so meticulously applying to the deck of the ketch.

He would disappear aboard the boat for days at a time. Peel had no way to follow him. He could only imagine where the stranger was going. Down the Helford to the sea? Around the Lizard to St. Michael’s Mount or Penzance? Maybe around the cape to St. Ives.

Then Peel hit upon another possibility. Cornwall was famous for its pirates; indeed, the region still had its fair share of smugglers. Perhaps the stranger was running the ketch out to sea to meet cargo vessels and ferry contraband to shore.

The next time the stranger returned from one of his voyages, Peel stood a strict watch in his window, hoping to catch him in the act of removing contraband from the boat. But as he leaped from the prow of the ketch onto the quay, he had nothing in his hands but a canvas rucksack and plastic rubbish bag.

The stranger sailed for pleasure, not profit.

Peel took out his notebook and drew a line through the word smuggler.

The large parcel arrived the first week of September, a flat wooden crate, nearly as big as a barn door. It came in a van from London, accompanied by an agitated man in pinstripes. The stranger’s days immediately assumed a reverse rhythm. At night the top floor of the cottage burned with light—not normal light, Peel observed, but a very clear white light. In the mornings, when Peel left home for school, he would see the stranger heading down the creek in the ketch, or working on his MG, or setting off in a pair of battered hiking boots to pound the footpaths of the Helford Passage. Peel supposed he slept afternoons, though he seemed like a man who could go a long time without rest.

Peel wondered what the stranger was doing all night. Late one evening he decided to have a closer look. He pulled on a sweater and coat and slipped out of the cottage without telling his mother. He stood on the quay. looking up at the stranger’s cottage. The windows were open; a sharp odor hung on the air, something between rubbing alcohol and petrol. He could also hear music of some sort—singing, opera perhaps.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher


[A] heart-stopping complex yarn of international terrorism and intrigue...A thrilling roller-coaster ride, keeping readers guessing until the mind-bending conclusion." —Publishers Weekly

Reading Group Guide

1. Gabriel Allon's work as one of the world's foremost art restorers has significant parallels to his work as one of the world’s foremost intelligence operatives. Indeed, the part titles of The Kill Artist allude to these parallels: Part One, "Acquisition"; Part Two, "Assessment"; and Part Three, "Restoration." What are the various parallels suggested by these part titles? What are the similarities between Gabriel's work in art restoration and his work in intelligence operations? The goal of the art restorer is to restore a painting so well that it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between the restorer's work and the original artist's. How is a similar kind of deception and layering of identity a part of intelligence work?

2. One of the epigraphs of the book is the motto of the Israeli secret service, the Mossad: "By way of deception, thou shalt do war." It turns out that in various ways this motto applies just as much to the workings within the Israeli secret service as it does to their dealings with their enemies. Towards the end of the novel, Yassir Arafat alludes to just that aspect when he says of Ari Shamron, "Shamron makes a habit of never letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing." How does Shamron employ this method through the course of the plan to assassinate Tariq? In many ways his plan is a brilliant success as a result. What negative consequences result from his method?

3. Ari Shamron trained Gabriel to become one of the world's best intelligence operatives. In the process, Gabriel became Shamron's best and most prized student and the two ended up working closely togetherfor many years. Such a relationship necessarily draws its strength from the bonds of trust and loyalty that are established, but at the same time of course their relationship is not immune to deception, given their environment. How does Shamron deceive Gabriel and vice versa, and how do their deceptions affect their relationship, both professional and personal? What can one say about their relationship by the novel's end?

4. Near the beginning of the novel, Gabriel says to Ari Shamron, "When you look into a man's eyes while pouring lead into his body, it feels more like murder than war." Shamron replies, "It's not murder, Gabriel. It was never murder."The distinction between murder and war in this novel is obviously extremely murky and complex. What lines of reasoning might one follow in support of Gabriel's position? And Shamron's? What is it in each of their characters and/or life experiences that causes them to disagree?

5. Part of Gabriel's reason for agreeing to help Shamron assassinate Tariq is that he thinks, perhaps consciously, perhaps not, that it may help him get past his family tragedy. Do you think that in the end he succeeds in this? Why or why not? Gabriel feels Israel can never be his home, yet for Jacqueline (Sarah), it becomes her home and brings her a measure of peace. Why so for her and not for Gabriel?

6. Much of the action that takes place in this novel results from a mingling of extremely complicated motivations: nationalism and ideals connected with love of one's homeland and of one's family on the one hand and one's own personal success or aggrandizement or vendetta or romantic love on the other. How do these motivations mingle in the case of Shamron's plan to assassinate Tariq and rehabilitate the reputation of the Israeli secret service within Israel? What about in the case of Gabriel? Tariq? Jacqueline Delacroix?

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