Daniel Silva

He has been placed in the same category as John le Carré and Graham Greene. He has been called his generation’s finest writer of international intrigue and one of the greatest American spy novelists ever. Compelling, passionate, haunting, brilliant: these are the words that have been used to describe the work of Daniel Silva.

Silva burst onto the scene in 1997 with his electrifying bestselling debut, The Unlikely Spy, a novel of love and deception set around the Allied invasion of France in World War II. His second and third novels, The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season, were also instant New York Times bestsellers and starred two of Silva’s most memorable characters: CIA officer Michael Osbourne and international hit man Jean-Paul Delaroche. But it was Silva’s fourth novel, The Kill Artist, that would alter the course of his career. The novel featured a character described as one of the most memorable and compelling in contemporary fiction, the art restorer and sometime Israeli secret agent Gabriel Allon, and though Silva did not realize it at the time, Gabriel’s adventures had only just begun. Gabriel Allon appeared in Silva’s next six novels, each one more successful than the last: The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger and The Secret Servant. The eighth Gabriel Allon novel, Moscow Rules, will be published on July 22, 2008.

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 joined UPI fulltime, working first in San Francisco, then on the foreign desk in Washington, and finally as Chief Middle East correspondent in Egypt and the Persian Gulf. In 1987, while covering the Iran-Iraq war, he met NBC Today Show correspondent Jamie Gangel. They were married within the year. Silva returned to Washington and went to work for CNN as Executive Producer of the talk show unit which included shows such as Crossfire, Capital Gang and Reliable Sources.


In 1995 he secretly began work on the manuscript that would eventually become The Unlikely Spy. After the book’s successful publication, he left CNN and began writing full time. He continues to reside in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. with his wife and 13-year-old twins, Lily and Nicholas. When not writing he can usually be found roaming the stacks of the Georgetown University library, where he does much of the research for his books.

All of Silva’s books have been New York Times and international bestsellers. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

He is already at work on a new Gabriel Allon novel and warmly thanks all those friends and loyal readers who have helped to make the series a success.