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Silva makes you believe history could have unfolded this way
Book Review
By Derryll White
Silva, Daniel (1996). The Unlikely Spy
One of our local reader/writers told me I had to read Daniel Silva. Steen said, “In all good conscience you can’t work in a bookstore and sell mysteries without reading this guy!” Okay, my mom brought me up to do what I was told, at least some of the time.
I picked up ‘The Unlikely Spy’ in Kingfisher Books, Creston. I don’t normally read war stories due to my real job as an historian. I often find myself arguing with the author’s interpretations and lose the story. But this was Silva’s first published novel and I thought I should enter his body of work at the beginning.
By the end of the first page I knew I liked Silva’s attention to detail, the way he methodically built characters with one perception overlaying another. We only meet Beatrice Pymm for 20 minutes of her life, but by the time she was dead the reader feels that she could have lived next door.
Daniel Silva wastes no time in moving the story along. By the beginning of chapter four the reader knows that Alfred Vicary, an accomplished history professor and Churchill’s pick to lead the new British Secret Service, is destined to do battle with ‘The Fox,’ Wilhlem Canaris and Hitler’s choice to lead his Secret Service, the Abwehr. It is also made known that Canaris is a leader of the Black Orchestra, a secret group dedicated to overthrowing Hitler.
The story unfolds from there through to 1945 and the end of the war. Silva is a good writer, entertaining and with the ability to make the reader believe that history could have unfolded this way. I will certainly look up more of Daniel Silva’s work later.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
