A Death in Vienna

Let there be no doubt that Daniel Silva is at the top of my power rotation of authors. I wait all year for his next book, and have never been disappointed. For authors of international thrillers, he has no peer.

This is the fourth in the 12-novel series about the Israeli assassin Gabriel Allon. I first read this book some years before we started the blog, and given that I have been traveling in Vienna, I thought it was appropriate to re-visit “A Death in Vienna.” Written in 2004, it is a powerful story about the Holocaust, the efforts by some to deny that it ever occurred, the efforts by others to keep those memories alive, and the efforts of still more to recreate the next Reich. Although this book is written in novel form, Silva has obviously done his research and much of what he has written about is quite real. The personal stories of brutality, tragedy, and survival of the Shoah (synonymous with Holocaust) are vivid, gripping, and artfully told.

In this story, a Nazi war criminal is discovered living in Vienna under an assumed identity in which he has achieved great political power and wealth. But, after WWI, Austria was declared Germany’s first war victim rather than its co-conspirator, and Austrians largely escaped having to bring their own war criminals to justice. After the war, some of those Austrian Nazis were hired by the U.S. to help set up its own intelligence agencies, so they had additional protection from being discovered. Yes, some former SS officers were knowingly put on the CIA parole, and the modern day CIA is not eager for their complicity to come to light.

In this story, Allon must leave his latest art restoration effort in Venice to investigate a bombing in Vienna, but his subsequent travels take him to Israel, Rome, Argentina, and back to Vienna. One the one hand, I find detailed accounts of events of the Holocaust so difficult to read and consider. On the other hand, Silva makes these viscerally disturbing events surprisingly readable and understandable. 

Having read everything Silva has written, I eagerly await his 13^th book in this series, and I will probably dive back into some more of his earlier novels.

Now it's April 2023, and I've reviewed this book again, this time in audiobook format. I obviously have a great love for Silva's work, and I've frankly never read a better account of the Holocaust than what he does throughout the novel. In Chapter 17, Silva gives a bold telling of Gabriel Allon's mother as she provides her verbal account of the war for Israel's Vad Yashem, the country's memorial to those who survived the war. Her account is both gripping and horrifying, yet brave and determined experience and survival of the Holocaust. I find it hard to rate these books when compared with Silva's other novels, but this just might be his best.