DANIEL SILVA – The Rembrandt Affair. Putnam, hardcover, July 2010. Signet, paperback, July 2011.

   There is no question Daniel Silva’s spy novels featuring ex-Mossad agent and art restorer Gabriel Allon are among the best written and most literate thrillers written today. The world Silva creates is both deeply realized and vividly portrayed and he orchestrates suspense and action as well as any major spy writer in a generation.

   Which is a really strange way to begin a bad review.

   This novel begins with Allon, recently retired from his employers the mysterious Office, in Cornwall with his Venetian born wife, Chiara, and visited by art dealer and friend Julian Isherwood, who is concerned with a missing Rembrandt and a murdered art restorer in Glastonbury whose latest project, a long lost Rembrandt portrait, has been stolen.

   The trail of the missing masterpiece leads Allon from haunted holy Glastonbury to Amsterdam, the center of the illegal art trade and forgery capital of Europe as well as home of Rembrandt himself, to Buenos Aires, and finally the lovely but duplicitous shores of Lake Geneva, where he finds the painting once again draws him into the world of international espionage and terrorism.

   Involved in the affair are a mysterious Swiss billionaire altruist who may also be behind the threat of modern terrorism, a guilt ridden art thief, and a beautiful London journalist, with a mistake of her own to redeem, who is key to Allon’s plan.

   And thereby hangs a tale, specifically my tale, or at least my review of this tale, because in Moscow Rules he recruits a beautiful woman to help him bring down a wealthy Russian secretly financing terrorism, and in Portrait of a Spy he recruits a beautiful woman to help him bring down an American born cleric in Yemen, and in The English Assassin…

   In each Allon has tried to quit the business, in each he stumbles onto a terrorist plot, in each some piece of art work is involved, in some the woman from the previous book helps him recruit the woman in the next. The women are all sophisticated, beautiful, and willing to use their minds and bodies to aid in the dangerous game afoot.

   In short, of the six books I’ve read by Daniel Silva they all have the exact same plot. Virtually no variation worth mentioning.

   It’s more than that though. Of the six books I have read he mentions a Mercedes Maybark on virtually the same page with virtually the same description.

   I have no problem with formula. Most great genre fiction is by nature formulaic. The gimmick on the old Man from U.N.C.L.E. series was that each week an innocent person would be drawn into the mission and be key to its success; but it wasn’t the virtually same person every week and no one was charging me close to $30 to read the damn things.

   Silva writes undeniably well, and his research and atmosphere are first rate, but he repeats the same book over and over and over, and it doesn’t matter if the characters have new names and some of the details and locations vary, each and every book is about a powerful untouchable shadow figure in the world of terrorism brought down by the reluctant spy Allon by pimping out a beautiful successful worldly woman.

   You would think someone would catch on eventually when he does damn near the same thing on the same page every book. This is as bad as S. S. Van Dine introducing the murderer in every Philo Vance mystery on the same page and line in every book.

   I can’t help but think that Silva is a better writer than this and his readers deserve more. I may be wrong. Perhaps they want to read the exact same book at $30 a pop over and over and over. Maybe they have short term memory problems. Maybe they don’t care and it is the world Silva portrays they love and plot and story and character don’t matter to them.

   Over time all writers repeat themselves, fall back on familiar phrases (James Bond’s ‘authentic comma of black hair’), revisit certain places, but even prolific John Creasey at the least managed to move the milieu from the Toff, to the Baron, to Patrick Dawlish, to Gideon, and so on and not do the exact same plot in the same series every time.

   It’s not that Silva repeats himself, it’s that he makes no effort to disguise it. He simply writes the same damn book over and over and expects his readers either to not notice or accept it, and no matter how talented he is, that is the work of a hack and not a writer. I have no problem with a writer selling out to success, but I do have a problem when he sells out his audience as well.

   Yes, it does matter for those of you who say so what. It matters because success like his breeds more bad books that do the same thing, and more lazy writers who think they can get away with it, and in the long run readers across the board are cheated, the genre is hurt, and good writers who try harder find it more difficult to break into a field where all the audience honors are reruns.

   Silva is worse to me than any hack because he is talented and writes well and has had success thanks to his fans, the ones he is shortchanging them even if they are too blinded to know it.

   In any case, now you at least know the plot to his next book — and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one …

   Ad infinitum, ad nauseum — literally.