A Death in Vienna

A Death of Vienna by Daniel Silva  403 pp.

Another in the Gabriel Allon series that I'm hooked on. This episode is the last of the cycle of novels where Allon is dealing with unfinished business from the Holocaust. The first, The English Assassin, dealt with the Nazi looting of art treasures and the Swiss banks that hid them. The Confessor, is about the role of the Catholic Church in WWII and Pope Pius XII's silence. In this book, Allon investigates a bombing in Vienna that seriously injures his friend and sometime fellow agent, Eli Lavon. In the process he uncovers the existence of a former Nazi SD officer charged with hiding the deaths of millions in the death camps. When Allon comes face to face with Radek the familiarity of the man leads him to discover that Sturmbahnführer Erich Radek had nearly killed Irene Allon, Gabriel's mother, who had survived the Birkenau death march. While Allon searches for a way to get Radek, Radek is trying to eliminate Allon by hiring a the same hired killer that bombed Lavon's office. As the author said in his notes at the end of the book, this was loosely based on actual events, including the fact that the CIA used former Nazis in an anti-USSR intelligence network.