House of Spies

Four months after a devastating ISIS attack on American soil, a new act of terror strikes London's West End — and the thread connecting the two events leads Gabriel Allon to the French Riviera, a glamorous drug trafficker, and a British former model who has chosen not to ask where her comfortable life comes from. The seventeenth Gabriel Allon novel places the recently elevated spy chief in the role of handler as well as field operative, managing unlikely assets in a high-stakes hunt for the mastermind known only as Saladin.

George Guidall narrates the Gabriel Allon series with a European-inflected sophistication that suits Silva's world of art, intelligence, and cultivated menace. His pacing through the novel's shifts from Saint-Tropez luxury to Casablanca grit gives each setting its proper atmosphere, and his rendering of Gabriel's characteristic cool authority anchors a book with a very large cast. At just over 13 hours, House of Spies is a full-scale entry in the series.