Over the years David Baldacci has created a range of interesting characters with superhuman abilities. Will Robie, the hitman with a conscience, and Jessica Reel, his female counterpart are two of the most remarkable ones whose non-stop action always ramps up the body count. If you like far-fetched page-turning thrillers, this one is definitely for you.
The first few chapters have Robie single handed taking down a terrorist mega-bomb threat in London and Reel in the thick of a wild and dangerous firefight in Iraq, both racking up huge body counts. The action-packed writing is some of the best I have read recently by a popular author.
Both of them are called back to DC urgently because their controller, the "Blue Man", real name Roger Walton, has gone missing while visiting his hometown in sparsely populated Colorado. It is imperative that Walton is found because he knows so many secrets about clandestine operations throughout the world.
The local community has many who have made their home there because they don't trust anything to do with law and order or government. The area is studded with extreme closely guarded right-wing compounds which makes it extremely hard find any information about Walton's whereabouts. Skinheads and neo-nazis abound. The area also has a disused missile silo that has been converted into a luxurious escape resort for super-rich worried about surviving a dramatic and catastrophic conflict, which they expect will destroy the world or the human race.
There are many places that Walton could be, all of them very uninviting and dangerous. When Robie and Reel start to uncover what might be going on things quickly get nasty and the body count rises again. By the end, I lost count of the bodies, and all I can say (as a spoiler) is that Robie and Reel survived to feature in a future adventure.
David Baldacci is a master writer of this kind of thriller. At times I have thought that he has run out of steam but with this one, I think he has shown that he is still on his top form after so many other good and sometimes not so good thrillers. Despite giving this book 5 stars, I still remember the Camel Club series as Baldacci's best.
I was able to review this book now because it was published in Australia 14 days before being released in the US.
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