“THE NEW GIRL” by Daniel Silva

So, Gabriel Allon is our family’s friend since nineteen books ago.

We like him because he is an extremely talented painter and art restorer.
We appreciate him for his fierce love of his family.
We admire him for how he defends his country and how he is leading his colleagues.
And we empathize with him as a Jewish son whose mother escaped Holocaust and named him Gabriel: “the one who defends Israel against the accusers; the angel of judgement.”

The last book in which Gabriel Allon appears is named “The new girl”, and it is written, as always, by the writer Daniel Silva.
The context of the book is the murder of the journalist from Saudi Arabia in their embassy from Istanbul.

“Khalid bin Mohammed is interested in two things. The first is power. The second is money.
For the Al Saud, they are one and the same.
Without power, there is no money. And without money, there is no power.”

“Khalid predicted that in twenty years, the price of oil would fall to zero. If Saudi Arabia was to have any future, it had to change, and quickly.
He wanted to modernize and diversify the economy.
He wanted to loosen the Wahhabi shackles on women and draw them into the workforce.
He wanted Saudi Arabia to be a normal country, with movies theatres, music, nightclubs, and cafés where people of both sexes could mingle without fear of the Mutaween.

He even talked about allowing hotels and restaurants to serve alcohol so Saudis wouldn’t have to make the drive across the causeway to Bahrain every time they wanted a drink.
It was radical staff.”

A small dose of reality for October 2019:

“Brexit, which was clandestinely supported by the Kremlin, was a national calamity. 

Britain would soon be a shell of its former self, unable to put up any meaningful resistance to Russia’s spreading influence and growing military power.”

Kindle, 2019