He was a small, wiry figure with hands that looked as though they had been borrowed from someone twice his size and teeth that looked like a steel trap. A week after the massacre, a man came to Bezalel to see Gabriel. He was studying there in September 1972, when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. Gabriel inherited his mother’s artistic talent and, after completing his mandatory service in the Israeli army, entered the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Israel’s national school of art. The daughter of Viktor Frankel, a well-known German expressionist painter who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942, she was one of the most important painters in the young State of Israel. His mother, Irene, was the far more dominant force in his life. We know little about Gabriel’s father, other than the fact that he was killed during the Six-Day War in 1967. As a result, young Gabriel’s first language was German rather than Hebrew, and German remains the language of his dreams to this day. His parents were German Holocaust survivors and spoke German at home. Unlike the archangel Gabriel, who is said to reside at the right hand of God, Gabriel Allon the man was born in a small, dusty agricultural town in the Jezreel Valley of Israel. In Hebrew, it means “oak tree.” I liked the image it conveyed, for Gabriel Allon was definitely solid as an oak. I decided that Gabriel’s last name should short, simple, and somewhat neutral: Allon. And, perhaps most important, Gabriel is the angel of revenge. He is the prince of fire and the guardian of Israel. Gabriel is the mightiest of God’s angels and His most important messenger. It is a beautiful name, and it is filled with much religious and historical symbolism. I finally decided to name him after the archangel Gabriel. The Israeli, as yet, had no name, and I thought long and hard before giving him one.

The Palestinian would be called Tariq al-Hourani. And it was the story of an Israeli assassin and intelligence officer who would be given the assignment of stopping him.

It was the story of a hard-line Palestinian terrorist who wanted to torpedo the peace process by carrying out a wave of high-profile attacks in Europe and America. I had the broad outlines of a story in mind. We were nearing the end of the Clinton administration, and the president was about to embark on a final, last-ditch effort to bring peace to the Middle East. In 2000, after publishing The Marching Season, the second book in the Michael Osbourne series, I decided it was time for a change.

The kill artist series