Fans of Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series wait with bated breath for each new book. Readers first met Gabriel Allon in The Kill Artist (2004).  He was a member of Israel's secret service and one of Golda Meir's instruments of revenge for the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.  In the most recent books, Allon, also a talented art restorer (which is often his cover), has risen to be Chief of Office, the head of Mossad.

Silva's stories are all ingenious, exciting, and rich in detail of people and places.  The books were never personally political; readers never had a sense of Silva's own politics and never had cause to even wonder.  Clearly, he is pro-Israel, which perhaps made readers unconsciously think he was conservative, since, with the passing of years, the Democrat party has become increasingly anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian.

Most of the history on which Silva bases his stories is accurate.  Whatever he invents, he reveals in his afterword.  Silva's wife is former NBC journalist Jamie Gangel.  A few books ago, in 2015, she moved from NBC to CNN.  It may be coincidental, but that is when a more politically leftist tone crept into the books.  This may be a reader's imagination, but judging from the readers' comments on Amazon for this newest book, many, many of his fans have noticed this and are submitting scathing reviews for The Order.  Why?

Like one or two of the previous books, this one is set in the Vatican.  Non-Catholics can and will learn a great deal about the Catholic Church from these particular stories.  Silva is a rigorous researcher as well as a storyteller.  Indeed, Silva has let some current-day politics creep into this story.  He clearly does not like President Trump, though he does not mention his name.  He describes the "far-right" Italian P.M. exactly as NeverTrumps here do.  He clumsily introduces (apparently added just before publication) the possibility of a pandemic early on, clearly an afterthought that never comes up again.  In this book, Gabriel mocks his friend for not taking man-made global warming seriously.  This was actually humorous, because Gabriel, as the character is written in over twenty books, would not fall for such an obvious hoax. 

Perhaps what has infuriated so many of the Amazon commenters is his depiction of the Church.  In this book, it has been co-opted by a backward-looking rogue organization within the Church that has designs on the papacy as a means to take the Church in an entirely different direction from where the current pope is steering it — a far less liberal direction.  This Order of the title has amassed great wealth thanks to a George Soros–like benefactor.  Its members are fascist, authoritarian, and corrupt.  Surely, though, the Church has weathered similar splinter groups over the centuries and survived. 

Most distressing, in fact most unsettling, is Silva's description of Paul Krugman as "the brilliant economist" in his Author's Notes.  The quotation of Krugman's, writing as a Jew, that Silva reproduces is entirely accurate: "Most of us, I think, know that whenever bigotry runs free, we're likely to be among its victims."  It is Silva's description of Krugman as brilliant that is jarring.  Krugman has been wrong about economics for decades.  He has been fatally wrong as well about from where the rise in anti-Semitism resides.  It is part and parcel of today's Democrat party, which has embraced Black Lives Matter unequivocally.  Anti-Semitism is a core principle of BLM.

So Silva has been co-opted by the left, perhaps by his wife's drift to the cheap leftism of CNN.  Silva was raised as a Catholic and converted to Judaism as an adult.  So he knows of what he writes about both of these mono-theological faiths.  That he has allowed himself to be seduced by anti-Trumpism is a disappointment, but his books are still well worth reading.  All those angry Amazon comments are unfair, reactionary.  Read the book; read all the books.  They are great stories, all of them relevant to the world today.  Silva should be forgiven his rather naïve shift to the left.  He needs to wake up to the fact that it is the left that betrays Jews every day of the week.