"Portrait of an Unknown Woman" by Daniel Silva

Above: "Portrait of an Unknown Woman" - Daniel Silva - 420 pages. I completed reading this book today, 27 November 2022.

The novel's timely account of the fake art Ponzi scheme coincides with the ongoing FTX scandal, very much a similar tale where investor payouts were funded from new investments and new borrowing secured by wildly overvalued assets. There's a valuable cautionary tale in this novel about whom you should trust with your money if nothing else.

Gabriel Allon has retired from being head of "The Office," (Mossad) and is now trying to live the quiet life as an art restorer (his great love as is seen in all of the Silva novels on Allon) in Venice with wife Chiara and their two young children.

The quiet life is disrupted. Allon's longtime friend in the art world, Julen Isherwood (a recurring figure in the Silva novels), London art dealer, asks Allon's help to track down a claim that a painting he had recently transacted, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, attributed to the painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck, was a fake. The source of the claim has met an untimely death in a suspicious auto accident in the south of France while on her way to meet with Isherwood in Bordeaux. Allon's inquiries lead to the discovery that the source's claim was correct. The painting was, indeed, a fake.

Allon unearths the fact that the painting in question represents the tip of the iceberg in a widespread fake painting operation involving a Spanish woman who, alone, knows the identity of the forger, a Paris gallery, through which the fake paintings are "laundered," and a well-known American art dealer and financier. It's not enough to bring to light a painting forgery conspiracy. The American art dealer has created an investor backed fund, secured by inflated value fake art, where investor guaranteed 15% return payouts are paid from the proceeds of fake art secured bank loans... a fake art Ponzi scheme, in effect.

Allon draws on the assistance of old friends, all of past spy days, all recognizable to Allon fans, to help him zero in on the vicious perpetrators: The Office itself, Isherwood's assistant Sarah Bancroft, a former CIA agent, Christopher Keller, Sarah's husband and former hired killer turned into MI-6 agent, and Anton Orsati, head of a Corsican assassination ring whose front is an olive oil business.

The perps are identified and brought to justice, but, not without Bancroft and Allon narrowly escaping a bombing set in their honor in the Paris galley and an assassination attempt in New York City.

This is Silva's 22nd Allon novel. I may have read half of them. The Allon series is escape, not literature. Its fast placed plot is set in trendy European settings: Venice (Harry's Bar, of course) London, Paris, Barcelona, Brooklyn, Corsica, Provence etc. Allon, who (fictionally) worked his way to the top of the Office by assassinating the eight Palestinian terrorist perps responsible for killing eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, even retired, is still at the top of his game in nailing down perps. However, I'm wondering how much more can be squeezed out of Gabriel Allon, now that he is no longer a big shot in the international spy world. Aside: the author, in an apparent attempt to humor his liberal reader base, interstices inharmonious anti Trump, anti-right-wing throwaways into his narrative. Silva's wife is a corporate media (CNN) correspondent, Jamie Gangel.

Silva's Gabriel Allon novels are mainly page turners with intricately crafted plots, but, in addition, this novel has much fascinating information about the machinations of the art world. The novel's timely account of the fake art Ponzi scheme coincides with the ongoing FTX scandal, very much a similar tale where investor payouts were funded from new investments and new borrowing secured by wildly overvalued assets. There's a valuable cautionary tale in this novel about whom you should trust with your money if nothing else.