Hero Gabriel Allon is a restorer of paintings and frescoes and also a reluctant member of Israeli intelligence. Action and suspense abound in this serious fiction with a serious purpose.

"After narrowly surviving his last operation, Gabriel Allon, the wayward son of Israeli intelligence, has taken refuge behind the walls of the Vatican, where he is restoring one of Caravaggio's greatest masterpieces. But early one morning he is summoned to St. Peter's Basilica by Monsignor Luigi Donati, the all-powerful private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII. The body of a beautiful woman lies broken beneath Michelangelo's magnificent dome....

A sometime Israeli spy by trade and an art restorer by preference, Gabriel Allon arrives in Zurich to clean the work of an Old Master for a millionaire banker -- only to find himself standing in his client's blood and framed for the murder. Without warning, Allon is drawn into a spiraling chain of events involving Nazi art theft, a decades-old suicide, and a bloody trail of killings -- some of them his own. The spy world Allon thought he had put aside...

Twelve-year-old Shai hates having to move to America and is determined to find a way get back home to Israel--until she starts opening up to new experiences and friendships.

After finding a hamster that has been left behind in his taxi, a lonely immigrant cab driver celebrates Hanukkah with the little creature, while waiting to learn if the owner will return.