Daniel Silva. The Black Widow. Harper, 2016.

The recriminations began even before the sun had risen. One party blamed the president for the calamity that had befallen America, the other blamed his predecessor. That was the only thing Washington was good at these days—recriminations and apportionment of blame. (483)

We have heard of Daniel Silva for a number of years and have read some rave reviews. Recently we had a chance to read one of his novels. His stuff may be the antidote for those of us who miss Tom Clancy.

Silva is different. The Black Widow is a spy novel. Yes, it includes things for the technodudes, but most of the conflict is mano a mano with lots of stealth. Here we begin to understand the making of a spy and the existential threat certain radicals can be not just to Israel but to a Western way of life.

The returning main character in Silva’s stories is Gabriel Allon, a skilled Israeli spy who also works in art restoration. He becomes involved in his latest adventure partly because of his past restoration work.

A public forum on current French Anti-Semitism in Paris is bombed and most of its participants are killed including an expert from Yale and a woman who operates a Holocaust study institute in Paris. She was a French Jew who survived the German invasion as a girl. Her family owned an original Van Gogh painting that they managed to hide from Nazi looters. She had Allon do some restoration work on the painting. She had no immediate family, so she willed the painting to Allon because he knew about the painting and he was a fellow Jew who would appreciate it.

The perpetrators of the crime were eventually identified by security videos. One was a Belgian Muslim man, the other was a French woman who had converted to Islam and radicalized. A few other similar crimes all seem to be related. Allon and the French see a need for espionage. Eventually spies from Britain, America, and Jordan get involved.

Intelligence services from different nations do not cooperate because they enjoy it. They do so because, like divorced parents of small children, they sometimes find it necessary to work together for the greater good. (75)

Most of the story, though, is not about Allon but about the young Israeli doctor he recruits, Dr. Natalie Mizrahi. We get a blow by blow record of her training, especially how she comes to internalize her false identity of Dr. Leila Hadawi. Natalie’s family immigrated from France to Israel. She grew up speaking French and Arabic. She has become a medical doctor.

She goes to France and begins working in a clinic that serves a Muslim population in one of the Parisian ethnic neighborhoods or banlieues. Her story is that she had a radical boyfriend who was killed fighting for ISIS. Though she grew up in France, her family was from a Palestinian village that no longer exists.

French and Israeli intelligence services have learned that the ISIS mastermind behind these attacks calls himself Saladin. The nom de guerre clearly indicates his intent. The historical twelfth century Saladin conquered Crusader outposts in the Levant and expanded an Islamic caliphate.

Espionage like political takeover is a long game. Eventually “Dr. Hadawi” is recruited and travels to Syria for interrogation and training. While there, she is blindfolded and taken to a remote location where she helps a badly injured leader recover. Everyone calls him Saladin. As the story goes on, we appreciate Saladin’s intelligence and ruthlessness.

There are no particular ethical issues for Dr. Mizrahi tending to a terrorist. In Israel she often saved injured Palestinian terrorists. It is the Hippocratic Oath. Besides, this gains her the trust of Saladin and those who are looking to destroy both Little Satan Israel and Great Satan America.

In addition to French, Belgian, and Syrian terrorists, we meet an English ISIS recruiter. Eventually American ISIS sympathizers come into play. One American, for example, names his son Mohamed: Not unusual for any Muslim, except that he named him after Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attacks.

Throughout the story we get a sense of what it is like for both Jews and Arabs in Israel and in France. The tale describes various problems and causes for violence. As politicians are wont to say, there are no easy answers. Silva understands things.

The author paces this realistic tale well. We note two things that made us think of other works. The home of a high ranking Israeli government official sounds very similar to a house of a different Israeli official described in The Last Jihad. This book and the very last one we reviewed both have devastating terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C. Both attacks are plausible. As the apostle wrote on numerous occasions: mē genoito! May it never be!