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Books by
Daniel Silva
The Confessor
The English Assassin
A Death in Vienna
Prince of Fire
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Daniel Silva
 Bio
Fast Facts
DanielSilvaBooks.com
More Daniel Silva
Buy the books!
Author Bibliography
A DEATH IN VIENNA Review
 & Excerpt
Author Talk
Daniel Silva began his career as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for UPI. He later became the executive producer of CNN's Washington-based public affairs programming, Following the surprise success of his debut novel The Unlikely Spy, Silva made the transition from journalist to full-time author. Silva has established himself as one of the premier writers of international intrigue stories. His books include The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin and The Confessor --- all of which were hardcover bestsellers.
To celebrate the release of his latest title, A Death in Vienna, the third book in the Gabriel Allon trilogy (The English Assasin and The Confessor were the first two titles), AuthorsOnTheWeb has chosen Daniel Silva as our Author of the Month. Readers can learn more about Silva's life and works through fast facts and biographical information, as well as links to his website, bibliography, interviews and book reviews.
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Fast Facts
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Silva is a self-proclaimed intelligence buff and has read a number of books about the CIA. While writing The Mark of the Assassin, he had the opportunity to visit a counterterrorism center inside the CIA that focuses specifically on terrorism, and talked to case officers about their backgrounds and the work they do.
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One day Silva's wife mentioned that they were having dinner with David Bull, the head of the restoration department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Silva then thought about the initial sketches he was doing for the main character in The Kill Artist and said, "Oh my God! An assassin whose cover job is art restoration." Thus the character of Gabriel Allon was born.
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Silva enjoys writing sympathetic villains who have some redeeming qualities more so than the stereotypical, cardboard cut-out, mustache-twirling bad guys. He believes that it's more satisfying for the reader to be able to identify with a real human being rather than a one-dimensional portrayal.
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Silva is shy and reserved. He prefers to lead a quiet life, which for him consists of writing in the morning and taking care of his children in the afternoon.
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Among the writers who have influenced Silva's work are John le Carré, Jack Higgins, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. He considers himself to be "a bit old-fashioned in my approach to storytelling and the style of my prose."
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Bio
 Daniel Silva began his journalistic career in San Francisco. He was pursuing a graduate degree in international relations at San Francisco State University when United Press International hired him for a temporary assignment during the Democratic National Convention in 1984. UPI offered him a job one week later, and he accepted.
Silva worked in San Francisco for a year before being transferred to UPI's foreign desk in Washington, D.C. In 1987 he was named Middle East Correspondent and covered the Iran-Iraq war, terrorism and political conflicts. While on assignment in the Persian Gulf, he met Jamie Gangel, National Correspondent for NBC News' Today. Following their marriage in 1988, Silva returned to Washington and was employed by CNN.
He worked in the newsroom of CNN's Washington Bureau for five years, producing such programs as The International Hour, Inside Politics, The World Today and Prime News. In 1993 he moved to the talk show unit --- serving as executive producer for Crossfire, The Capital Gang, Late Edition and Evans & Novak --- and in 1994 began working on The Unlikely Spy, his first novel.
It was published in 1996, and featured two of the unlikeliest secret agents imaginable --- a history professor chosen by Winston Churchill himself during World War II to expose a dangerous but unknown traitor, and a beautiful widow of a war hero who, under direct orders from Hitler, must uncover the Allied plans for D-Day. The Unlikely Spy was a surprise bestseller and received much critical acclaim.
Silva left CNN in June 1997 to concentrate full time on writing. The Mark of the Assassin (1998), his sophomore effort, is about a CIA officer named Michael Osbourne who is obsessed with finding an elusive and lethal assassin. In the process, he puts himself and his loved ones in extraordinary peril. Osbourne returned the following year in The Marching Season, in which a renegade group of Protestant extremists attempts to shatter the peace process in Northern Ireland --- and marks Michael's father-in-law, a former U.S. Senator, for execution.
2000 saw the release of The Kill Artist, which introduced readers to the character of Gabriel Allon, a key operative in secret Israeli intelligence missions who is now assuming a quiet life as a restorer of priceless works of art. He returns to his former life, though, in order to capture a Palestinian terrorist on a killing spree who played a dark role in his past.
Silva brought back the Israeli agent for his next three novels. In 2002's The English Assassin, Gabriel is sent to Zurich to restore the painting of a reclusive millionaire banker --- but discovers upon arriving that his would-be employer has been murdered and a secret collection of illicitly acquired Impressionist masterpieces is missing. In The Confessor (2003), Gabriel is asked to investigate the vicious murder of his friend Benjamin Stern, a onetime agent who was researching and writing a book on the role of the Vatican in the Holocaust. Silva's latest effort is A Death in Vienna, which finds Gabriel in the Austrian city in order to discover the truth behind the bombing of an old friend; while there, he encounters something that turns his world upside down.
Silva and his wife live in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. with their twins, Lily and Nicholas.
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