Finished: 'The Secret Servant' & 'Storm Front'

I'm either a fast reader or a slow blog poster, or a little of both, but I had two recently-finished books to post about (don't finish a sentence with a preposition).

Continuing to knock off Daniel Silva's books, the latest being The Secret Servant. I like Silva because he brings personal knowledge and good connections to make his international espionage thrillers very realistic. He was a Middle East correspondent for UPI and also worked for CNN. He's married to NBC reporter Jamie Gangel (pictured).

TSS is the seventh in the Gabriel Allon series, in Wiki's words:

In this entry in the series, Gabriel Allon, the master art restorer and sometime officer of Israeli intelligence, had just prevailed in his blood-soaked duel with Saudi terrorist financier Zizi al-Bakari. Now Gabriel is summoned once more by his masters to undertake what appears to be a routine assignment: travel to Amsterdam to purge the archives of a murdered Dutch terrorism analyst who also happened to be an asset of Israeli intelligence. But once in Amsterdam, Gabriel soon discovers a terrorist conspiracy festering in the city’s Islamic underground: a plot that is about to explode on the other side of the English Channel, in the middle of London.

I gave it a 7-minus on the Haugenometer. Goodreads scored it 4.21 out of 5; and Amazon 4.5 of 5.

If you like CIA/Mossad/terrorist action with interesting characters and settings, you'll like.

If you like Minnesota cops/Mossad/blondes skinny dipping, you'll like John Sandford's Storm Front, the seventh novel in the Virgil Flowers series.

While I'm a big fan of Virgil's boss, Lucas Davenport, who plays bit parts in these novels, I really enjoy Flowers: soft-hearted, walleye-catching, skirt-chaser. The setting is Mankato, MN, and the plot, while sometimes confusing me with all its characters, kept me guessing until the end.

Amazon recaps:

An ancient relic is unearthed during an archaeological dig. A Minnesota college professor is keeping a secret that could change the world’s history as we know it. For Virgil Flowers, the link between the two is inescapable—and his investigation, more dangerous and far-reaching than he can possibly imagine.

I gave it a 7, Goodreads a 3.83, and Amazon a 4.