Daniel Silva

Daniel Silva is an American thriller writer and former journalist whose career gave him the research instincts that define his fiction. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1960, he worked for UPI as a Middle East correspondent in Cairo and the Persian Gulf before becoming an executive producer at CNN, where he met NBC/CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel while both were covering the region; they married in 1987. Silva drew on that reporting background for three research-dense standalone thrillers in the 1990s — The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season — before creating the character who would define his career. Since 2000's The Kill Artist, Silva has published a Gabriel Allon novel almost every year. Allon is an Israeli intelligence officer and art restorer who moves between coaxing Old Masters back to life and eliminating threats to Israel and the West, with each book built around a real current-events flashpoint, from Russian disinformation to Vatican intrigue. The series now runs to more than two dozen entries with genuine continuity across them. New readers should start with The Kill Artist rather than the earlier standalones, which share no characters with Allon. There is no film or TV adaptation to date, though Silva remains one of the genre's most reliably bestselling authors, publishing every July.