Daniel Silva with Jamie Gangel: Ransom — Gabriel Allon Returns
Bestselling spy novelist Daniel Silva discusses his 29th thriller with CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel, exploring deception, greed, and the blurred line between intelligence and crime.
Why we picked this
Silva's twenty-nine novels have built a readership that takes spy fiction seriously as geopolitical commentary — and having his wife, a veteran CNN political correspondent, as his interviewer means the conversation tends to go somewhere a standard author Q&A wouldn't.
Daniel Silva has spent more than two decades refining what literary spy fiction can do: use the mechanics of the thriller to examine real geopolitical forces, national identities, and the moral costs of covert work. His protagonist Gabriel Allon — art restorer, Israeli intelligence chief — is one of the genre’s most fully realized characters, and Ransom is his twenty-ninth novel. The new book follows Allon into the disappearance of Alice Winter, a British socialite whose case pulls him into a world of obscured money, dangerous secrets, and the kind of corruption that survives precisely because it looks like legitimate wealth.
Silva has sold tens of millions of books in thirty-plus languages, which tells you something about the scale of his readership. But what makes this Tattered Cover appearance worth the trip is his conversation partner. Jamie Gangel is an Emmy Award-winning CNN political correspondent and former NBC Today anchor with thirty-plus years of experience interviewing heads of state, intelligence officials, and political figures — and she happens to be Silva’s wife. Their conversations have a quality that staged author Q&As rarely achieve: the interviewer already knows where the pressure points are.
Doors open at 5:00 PM. Tickets include a signed hardcover copy of Ransom, author meet-and-greet, and personalized signing after the conversation.