Daniel Silva: AN INSIDE JOB

From a boat in the Venetian lagoon, art restorer and retired super-spy Gabriel Allon spots a body which will kickstart his latest investigation into criminal goings-on in the art world. The dead woman recently identified a painted-over insignificant work in the Vatican archive as a lost Leonardo. Doubly lost, after its recent removal from the Archive, this is already the most valuable picture in the world.

The Camorra, Calabria’s savage Mafia, is open to bidding from unscrupulous collecters. The painting is soon worth half a billion dollars. Allon plans to steal it back and replace it with a perfect copy, knocked off in a busy few days by – who else? – Allon himself, who is an accomplished forger on top of his many other skills.

An Inside Job is pure hokum from the Dan Brown School of Writing (of which Daniel Silva was a past master long before Mr Brown entered the frame – this is Gabriel Allon’s twenty-fifth outing). Silva gives this hokum a stylish elegance and enough detail to carry his readers over the ‘You’ve-Got-To-Be-Kidding’ threshold and make the inconceivable convincing. This is the most entertaining spy fiction since Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise books. A joy to read.