Just Finished Reading Daniel Silva's Portrait of a Spy

Daniel Silva is an American author with an interesting niche in fiction: a successful espionage series featuring as the protagonist an Israeli secret agent.  His first book in the Gabriel Allon series came out in 2000 and he has been putting them out pretty much annually since...the seventeenth installment is due out later this year.  I just finished reading my first book by Silva, number eleven in the Allon series, titled Portrait of a Spy...

One major advantage that standalone novels have over series is that, especially in stories involving suspense and peril, you never can be sure just who will survive to the end and who will perish.  With series, the main protagonist is certain to endure, while it's also a more or less safe bet that the series regulars will make it, too, to start afresh in the next book.  So in spite of Gabriel Allon finding himself in numerous very dangerous situations in the story I read, I was kind of bored...the suspense here is in what happens to the "guest" characters.  In Portrait of a Spy, Allon has recently retired from working as an Israeli spy and is living with his wife in Cornwall, England, doing what he likes best: restoring great paintings.  But a rash of terrorist attacks in Western cities, along with one that Allon witnesses and unsuccessfully tries to stop, leads him to serve at least one more espionage stint with the aim to infiltrate the new terror ring and bring it down.  Enter the "guest" character as an important asset in this project...and that's about all I'm going to say about this story so that I don't give it all away...

I've read only one Gabriel Allon book, but I get the basic premise: the Israelis are better at the spy game because their very survival depends on their success, while other countries like America and Britain have more or less institutionalized the field and depend much more heavily on technological prowess to achieve their ends.  The clumsy and overly political Americans and Brits keep getting in Allon's way...kind of reminds me of a few James Bond flicks...

Usually I avoid picking up a book in the middle of a series like this, and I should have known better: I already possess a Gabriel Allon novel that I got in a local used book sale but never got around to reading.  No, for this type of genre it's much better to read a story that stands alone without any sequels and for which the author's intended suspenseful sequences ring true for the reader...