The New Girl begins with the introduction of a new student, a new girl at a Private School in Geneva, Switzerland. There is a mystery surrounding this new girl but it isn’t until she is kidnapped that we learn who she is, Jihan is the daughter of Khalid bin Mohammed, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The clear intentions that Bin Mohammed has to socially reform Saudi Arabia have come into conflict with the plans of other nation states for Saudi Arabia and the larger Middle East. It is this interruption of those plans which have led to the kidnapping of his daughter.
Khalid Bin Mohammed commonly known as KBM, seeks the aid of Gabriel Allon and Sarah Bancroft to find his daughter. In searching for the girl’s kidnappers, Allon, Bancroft and KBM uncover a plot by foreign nations to seek to gain control of Saudi Arabi by allying with a member of Bin Mohammed’s family. We discover that the plot was uncovered by a reporter Omar Nawwaf and ultimately cost him his life, Omar is killed and dismembered in a consulate in Istanbul and whose murder was suspected to be at the order of KBM.
Silva taps into the news of today to unveil a story of espionage, and political unrest. He takes the topics which we have heard in the news to their next logical conclusion with suppositions which seem plausible in the times we live in. It is a fast-paced novel which involves many of the nations which are in the news today pitting the East against West. The New Girl is a thriller which builds on today’s breaking news stories and gives us an avenue for understanding why we should care and what could possibly be at the heart of political intrigue. Submitted by Kisha Jones.