When Daniel Silva writes a novel, especially one in his best-selling Gabriel Allon series, it's a pretty safe bet that what's on the surface is rarely the same underneath. That's definitely the case in his latest, A Death in Cornwall, which hit bookstores this week. it begins with the death of an Oxford art history professor, and is a thrill ride through the world of shady art dealings, tax avoidance, and power.
Readers can hear Silva talk about all that more in two Texas appearances, one on Sunday, July 14 in Dallas at the Aaron Family Jewish Community Center, the other on Monday, July 15 at Congregation Beth Yeshurun. Admission to each includes a copy of A Death in Cornwall, which guests can have signed following the event. Silva will discuss the novel and his writing with Robert Steinfeld, an Emmy Award-winning producer, in Dallas. At press time, the J in Houston had not yet announced who would facilitate the discussion. Tickets ($38) for the Houston event are available here.
Courtesy of HarperCollins
Author Daniel Silva makes two Texas appearances, discussing his new novel, A Death in Cornwall.
"I love coming back to Texas," Silva tells CultureMap. "I come every year. And Texas has been has always been an important state for me, and I love the two communities [Dallas and Houston]. I see lots of new faces every year, but I always see, you know, old, friends from years past and it's just wonderful."
Those "old friends," fans who've followed the Gabriel Allon series from its inception, will recognize many familiar faces in this new novel. But readers who've never picked up a Silva novel will find a robust read that provides an easy onramp to this well-established, 24-year-old series.
A quick recap for the uninitiated: Gabriel Allon is one of the world's foremost art restorers. He's also a former assassin and head of the Israeli secret service. Having retired from that post three books ago, he's living happily in Venice, a city he's always loved, with his wife and twin children. He's restoring an historic altar piece when he gets a call from an old friend in Cornwall, who's convinced the death of the professor is actually a murder, and that her involvement in researching a Picasso is part of what got her killed.
Setting the novel in England was a deliberate choice, Silva says.
"This is really a vehicle to bring back a much beloved character who first appeared in the very first Gabriel Allon novel, the detective sergeant Timothy Peel," he says. "He's in the very first novel as an 11 year old kid."
That character has earned the enduring affection of readers, something that was somewhat surprising to him, he says. Bringing Peel back into the story, he says, "was a suggestion-slash-request from my wife. I am aware of what's coming over the transcript from readers. But I try to stay in the work bubble. But Jamie [Gengal, CNN special correspondent and Silva's wife] always had a better grasp of how beloved this little character was by readers."
Readers are whisked rom the windswept cliffs of Cornwall to the hidden spaces of the Geneva Freeport, to the halls of banking power in London in a genre-bending story.
"This is part mystery, part art mystery, part art caper, part political thriller," says Silva, who also admits to bending and making up the rules of those established genres as he goes along.
"This is sort of a thriller, but it's a little lighter. It's not quite a cozy, but it's almost a cozy. There's violence in it, but it's understated, always," he says.
"I'm a big fan of the Counting Crows. And if you were to go to a Counting Crows show one night, they might play a song one way. Then you could go to a show a week later, and they would play that same song completely differently, and it would be incredibly beautiful. Gabriel is like a piece of music that I can play that melody sort of any different way that I want to."
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the professor's murder is connected to a much larger plot involving money laundering through artworks. Silva was inspired, in part, by what he says is the chaos of British politics over the last couple of years.
"I'm quite certain that most people do not realize that London is known as the money laundering capital of the world, or what that means," he says. "I think that, in my own little way, I open a window for readers on what might have been driving some of that."
Guests who attend either event should expect a lively conversation with ample opportunity for questions and answers from the audience, which is one of the things Silva enjoys most about appearances like these. And while he misses what he calls being crammed into bookstores with fans, he recognizes that events in larger auditoriums mean that more people can attend.
"And I think the audiences gets more out of it when two people on are on stage conversing than with just one awkward author standing at a podium," he says. "And the best part of it is always, now that the pandemic is, in our rearview mirrors, I've been able to have proper signings again, which is wonderful because, that minute or so that you spend with your readers, is just invaluable."
As he settles into his annual book tour, Silva says he's had a great deal of fun writing A Death in Cornwall. He's happy with where his main character is in his life.
"It's a version of Gabriel in this novel that I'm very, very fond of," he says. "I love the tone of this novel. I love the humor of this novel. And every time I read certain passages of it, I can just laugh at them all over again."
Readers may well do the same.
