This is an earlier novel in the series about art restorer and part-time Mossad agent/assassin Gabriel Allon. Allon is called away from an important art restoration job in Venice to investigate the murder of his friend and one-time partner, Professor Benjamin Stern. Stern was murdered and the book he was working on was stolen. Allon must find out what was in the book that caused Stern's death and find the killer. What he uncovers is a secret hidden by the Vatican since World War II, a plot to assassinate the pope and a secret society called Crux Vera. In the process Allon must outwit a notorious assassin known as "The Leopard."
While the plot of this thriller is good, it is not as tightly written as others in the Gabriel Allon series. I was disappointed in the author having his highly skilled operative make an uncharacteristic stupid mistake in order to get the story where he wanted it to go. It is interesting that Silva's book about a secret Roman Catholic society came out around the same time as Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Even more interesting than that coincidence was the note in the Acknowledgments about an altercation between an ABC reporter and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI). This kind of stuff could almost make one believe in conspiracy theories.
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