Book Review: The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

“The Unlikely Spy” by Daniel Silva is a fictional, fast paced page turner, set mostly in days preceding the Normandy invasion in WWII. The story’s unlikely hero is a university professor Alfred Vicray who was recruited by none other then Winston Churchill himself to work for the British MI5.

• 752 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451209303

 

My rating for The Unlikely Spy – 5
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Vicary is a spy catcher – he does his job well until realizing that a small group of German sleeper agents trained by Abwehr officer Kurt Vogel are still in Britain. The threat is that the German agents could discover the secrets to the invasion and allow the Germans to setup a proper defense line (or call the invasion off) and the invasion would fail.

Chief among the German spies is Anna Katerina von Steiner, known in Britain as Dutch tourist Catherine Blake. Catherine is an attractive woman and a top notch spy who has been a sleeper agent in London for six years – now she has been activated by Vogel.
Let the mind games and puzzles begin….

The plot twists and turns very cleverly and the ending caught me by surprise. Even though this is a big book, the narrative is told masterfully, the twists keep coming and it’s hard to stop reading.

The characters in “The Unlikely Spy” are well drawn, they each are painted in shades of gray -the German spies have some redeeming qualities and the English MI5 agents are not depicted as saints doing G-d’s work.

Buy The Unlikely Spy from Amazon.com*
More Books by Daniel Silva*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I borrowed this book from the local library.
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