The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva

I love this series featuring Israeli spy/master art restorer Gabriel Allon and his beautiful and talented wife Chiara. And even though Fallen Angel has a promising start, it was not my favorite in the series. Gabriel is working on a restoration project at the Vatican when a beautiful curator is found dead in St. Peter's Basilica. Was it a suicide or was it murder? The Vatican asks Gabriel to conduct a shadow investigation into the death. His team soon focuses on a Vatican banker who seems to be leading a whole other life under a respectable surface. That part of the book I liked. But about halfway through, everything started bogging down. The writing got kind of preachy and the plot came to a grinding halt for pages and pages of details on the history and architecture of the Middle East. I like learning new things along the way when reading a thriller. That's part of why I like Linda Fairstein's "Alexandra Cooper" series--I've learned so much about the history of New York City while her plots are unfolding. But this was just too much detail. I finally started skimming, just to see how the main story ended. I will read the next book in the series but I hope Daniel Silva goes back to the tone and pacing of his earlier novels.