Portrait of an Unknown Woman
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3 Months Free
Buy Now for £12.49
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Narrated by:
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Edoardo Ballerini
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By:
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Daniel Silva
In a spellbinding new masterpiece by #1 New York Times–bestselling author Daniel Silva, Gabriel Allon undertakes a high-stakes search for the greatest art forger who ever lived
Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon has at long last severed ties with Israeli intelligence and settled quietly in Venice, the only place he has ever truly known peace. His beautiful wife, Chiara, has taken over day-to-day management of the Tiepolo Restoration Company, and their two young children are clandestinely enrolled in a neighborhood scuola elementare. For his part, Gabriel spends his days wandering the streets and canals of the watery city, parting company with the demons of his tragic, violent past.
But when the eccentric London art dealer Julian Isherwood asks Gabriel to investigate the circumstances surrounding the rediscovery and lucrative sale of a centuries-old painting, he is drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse where nothing is as it seems.
Gabriel soon discovers that the work in question, a portrait of an unidentified woman attributed to Sir Anthony van Dyck, is almost certainly a fiendishly clever fake. To find the mysterious figure who painted it—and uncover a multibillion-dollar fraud at the pinnacle of the art world—Gabriel conceives one of the most elaborate deceptions of his career. If it is to succeed, he must become the very mirror image of the man he seeks: the greatest art forger the world has ever known.
©2022 Daniel Silva (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedAnother great story
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Excellent
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One small quibble: the narrator is mostly pretty good, but quite a lot of the French was mispronounced - Chamonix with the final ‘x’ sounded was the most glaring, but there were others. Otherwise quite a good successor to the excellent George Guidall.
Another masterpiece…
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I enjoyed the story for it's culture and erudition and clear, dignified prose style. The main character is sometimes cartoonishly accomplished and effective, but I guess that's the deal. I do sometimes just get a sudden view of the book as only a thinking person's Dan Brown, where the author has at least done more than plagiarise a tourist office's cabinet of brochures, but still a lot of the glamour is just mentioning foreign names and writing down city street directions in a way that ostentatiously implies the author has been there. It's good glamour, though. I do wish that the main character could be tested a bit more, and grow. then again, maybe his race is run at this point and this is a new format from the earlier books.
Very entertaining
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Similarly, the narrator is exceptionally good yet again, one of the very best on audible. He makes some of the vox popular of narrators, like Stephen Fry, seem sadly one dimensional.
Another golden masterpiece from Silva
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