Daniel Silva · 2003 · thriller

Daniel Silva's 2003 novel. When a Holocaust historian is shot dead in Munich, the art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon leaves his Bellini in Venice to investigate. The murdered scholar's research leads back to Rome and the guarded heart of the Vatican - and a decades-old secret about the Church's silence during the Holocaust that powerful men will still kill to keep.

1. 1
   Venice

   In Venice, restoring an altarpiece by Bellini, Gabriel Allon receives word that Benjamin Stern - a historian and the son of Allon's old mentor - has been murdered in Munich over a dangerous book, and he sets out at once.

2. 2
   Munich

   In Munich, Allon finds Stern's flat ransacked and his research gone, and picks up the thread: a secret wartime conference of the Church, and a shadowy ultra-conservative order within the Vatican willing to kill to bury the past.

3. 3
   Rome

   The trail draws Allon to Rome and into the Vatican itself, where a reforming pope means to confront the Church's silence during the Holocaust - and the men of Crux Vera plot in the shadows to stop him, and Allon, for good.