Book Report -- Daniel Silva, Andrew Klavan -- Publication Day

Well, pre-ordering books is still a good thing, but on certain publication dates I'm used to staying awake until midnight and voila, clock strikes twelve, carriage turns to pumpkin, and new book shows up on my Kindle at midnight. Or twelve-oh-two, or twelve-oh-six. Thanks, Amazon.
But that midnight thing was a west coast thing, an Amazon corporate time thing, a Seattle thing.
Back here in America, in the Ouachita's, Daniel Silva's new book didn't appear until two-ish.
I'm not complaining, merely describing. But that was a long moonlit wait for Gabriel Allon.

Hugh Hewitt on Portrait of a Spy:

Silva's great contribution isn't the extraordinarily high entertainment value of the amazing series of 11 Allon thrillers that began with "The Kill Artist" in 2000.
It is that Silva is explaining the realities of the world we live in through his fiction. A handful of novelists have been climbing this mountain in recent years: Alex Berenson, Robert Ferrigno, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor and others.
Some have created characters like Flynn's Mitch Rapp who embody the American hero who is every day on the front lines of this long war. Others try to communicate the possible consequences of a long war on national character and international relations as Steven Pressfield does in his new offering "The Profession."
Silva's great contribution, though, is to communicate Israel's situation and Israel's perspective. Allon is a great ambassador for the Jewish state, and Israel's real ambassador, the historian Michael Oren, would do well to keep boxed sets of the Allon novels close at hand for the Americans he finds uncommonly dense as to the way the world really works and how it is understood by -- and must be understood by -- the realists within Israel.

Read all of Hugh Hewitt's piece on Silva and Gabriel Allon in the Washington Examiner.
Hewitt interviewed Silva today, and the transcript may show up here sometime soon. Usually does...


Adding to today's literary perfection, making June 19, 2011, a good-good day for a bookass such as yours truly, also released is the fourth and final installment in Andrew Klavan's Homelanders series: Final Hour.

Written for the Young Adult market, suitable for all of us. American boy vs. Islamists. Yeah.

If that weren't enough, proving that life is good, still to come this year:

Mitch Rapp in Vince Flynn's Klll Shot

and Jack Reacher in Lee Child's The Affair