Gabriel’s adventures had only just begun. Gabriel Allon appeared in Silva’s next four novels, each one more successful than the last:
Silva knew from a very early age that he wanted to become a writer, but his first profession would be journalism. Born in Michigan, raised and educated in California, he was pursuing a master’s degree in international relations when he received a temporary job offer from United Press International to help cover the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Later that year Silva abandoned his studies and joined UPI fulltime, working first in San Francisco, then on the foreign desk in Washington, and finally as Middle East correspondent in Cairo and the Persian Gulf. In 1987, while covering the Iran-Iraq war, he met NBC correspondent Jamie Gangel. They were married later that year. Silva returned to Washington and went to work for CNN. In 1994 Jamie gave birth to a set of twins, Lily and Nicholas.
In 1995 he confessed to Jamie that his true ambition was to be a novelist. With her support and encouragement he secretly began work on the manuscript that would eventually become
Though all of Silva’s books have been