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. Sent to Vienna to authenticate a painting, art restorer and occasional spy Gabriel Allon sets out to uncover the truth about a photograph of an unnamed man who had brutalized his mother during the final days of World War II.

In June 1944, the Nazis locked eighteen-year-old Dave Hersch into a railroad boxcar and shipped him from his hometown of Dej, Hungary, to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the harshest, cruellest camp in the Reich. After ten months in the granite mines of Mauthausen's nearby sub-camp, Gusen, he weighed less than 80 lbs. Somehow surviving the relentless horrors of these two brutal camps, as Allied forces drew near Dave was forced to join a death march...