Central Kansas Library System

When the body of a woman is found beneath Michelangelo's dome, Gabriel Allon is summoned by Monsignor Luigi Donati to secretly investigate this mysterious death that has been ruled a suicide--a case that brings about an unthinkable act of sabotage that will plunge the world into a conflict of apocalyptic proportions.

A sometime Israeli spy by trade and an art restorer by preference, Gabriel Allon arrives in Zurich to clean the work of an Old Master for a millionaire banker -- only to find himself standing in his client's blood and framed for the murder. Without warning, Allon is drawn into a spiraling chain of events involving Nazi art theft, a decades-old suicide, and a bloody trail of killings -- some of them his own. The spy world Allon thought he had put aside...

"Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of intractable conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to take to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend. Theirs is a life in which children from both sides of the wall throw stones at one another. But their worlds shift irreparably when ten-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet meant to quell unruly...

"In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian, journeyed to Israel with the goal of seeing the beloved stone house with the lemon tree behind it that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family left fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust. On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and...

Hero Gabriel Allon is a restorer of paintings and frescoes and also a reluctant member of Israeli intelligence. Action and suspense abound in this serious fiction with a serious purpose.