Review: The New Girl by Daniel Silva

The New Girl (Gabriel Allon, Book #19)
by Daniel Silva
Release Date: July 16th 2019
2019 Harper Collins Publishers
Kindle Edition: 496 Pages
ISBN: 978-0062834836
ASIN: B07F18ND4
Genre: Fiction / Thriller
Source: Review copy from publisher

3 / 5 Stars

Summary
At an exclusive private school in Switzerland, mystery surrounds the identity of the beautiful girl who arrives each morning and leaves each afternoon in a heavily protected motorcade fit for a head of state. She is said to be the daughter of a wealthy international businessman. She is not. And when she is brutally kidnapped across the border in the Haute-Savoie region of France, Gabriel Allon, the legendary chief of Israeli intelligence, is thrust into a deadly secret war with an old enemy that will determine the future of the Middle East—and perhaps the world.

My Thoughts
The New Girl is the nineteenth entry in the Gabriel Allon series and while this book was a quick read with interesting elements, I felt it really didn't live up to some of the earlier entries in this series, and I was somewhat disappointed by 'unbelievable' plot that was developed in this book.  Sometimes it's just so hard to accept so-called possibilities that occur in novels.

First of all, I love Gabriel and all the characters that surround him in all of these books.  I am a huge fan of this series and have enjoyed the ways in which Gabriel has 'saved the day' in the past, often just using logic, skill, and lots of luck.  When a story line starts delving into the 'unbelievable', where I have to suspend belief for a time, it can get somewhat tricky; this is when the plot can sometimes border on the absurd and has taken a step a bit too far.  This is how I felt in this book.  And it wasn't because it wasn't interesting, it was, I just didn't buy into it.

And while I always enjoy Gabriel and his interactions with people around the world and the delicate political balance involved during his missions, I was not that crazy about one of the main characters in this book as I felt like his character was all over the place, bad-boy millionaire, goody-goody prince, almost as if the author couldn't quite make up his mind which one of the two he wanted his character to resemble which made things confusing for the reader.  I personally didn't care which route the author took, but I felt he needed to stop waffling and make a choice.  Because of this back-and-forth though, the whole redemption arc didn't quite ring true with me and I really felt like the author needed a good reason to encourage people to read what could happen next.  I don't think he really needed to do that as the whole journalist angle was quite interesting enough without doing that and I was hoping the author would take up that 'hook' he dangled in this book into the next one and it looks like he will.  

Verdict
The New Girl should not be read as a stand alone however, as there is important information in this book that follows directly from the previous book.  I was really hoping there would be more fallout from the events in the previous book but I was sorely disappointed in that regard.  I think the author did not use a great opportunity here as things could have been really dicey for Gabriel and so, so fascinating.  This book was just so-so and didn't really have the tension of his other books.  I'm also not personally convinced that adding real-life events to this book actually worked. While I will be continuing the series, I would only recommend this book for die-hard fans who will need the information in this book to continue with the series.  I will not however, read this one again.