The Order

Pope Paul VII dies suddenly while Gabriel Allon is on holiday in Venice, and when the Swiss Guard who was standing watch goes missing along with a letter the Holy Father was writing to Allon himself, the chief of Israeli intelligence suspects the official account. What the letter contained is the secret of a suppressed gospel that a shadowy Catholic society with far-right connections will kill to keep buried. Daniel Silva's twentieth Gabriel Allon novel immerses the series in Vatican intrigue with characteristic scope.

George Guidall narrates with the measured authority he brings to the entire series, giving the Vatican sequences their appropriate weight and the contemporary thriller elements their momentum without sacrificing either. His voice is by now thoroughly associated with Gabriel Allon's world, and the familiarity serves the audiobook well in a novel that builds substantially on the series' accumulated history. At just under ten hours, this is an efficiently constructed entry in a long-running espionage franchise.