Davis Baldacci: End Game

So action-packed I lost count of the bodies!
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.

David Baldacci: No Man's Land (John Puller Novel 4)

Reality check needed when Baldacci ventures into "No Man's Land"
There are two stories, both of which started nearly thirty years ago.

John Puller's mother disappeared mysteriously then and despite an intensive search and investigation, she was never seen again. New evidence has just come to light that Puller's father, now a retired 3 star General suffering dementia, had secretly come home to Fort Monroe from overseas on the day his wife disappeared and is now a suspect in her disappearance.

John Puller is now a crack CID investigator with the Army and would be officially barred from working the case and face a court-martial if he disobeys orders. It is not in his nature to do nothing in a case affecting him and his family. When intelligence operative Veronica Knox, his old "friend" and ally on other cases turns up he knows that the case has far more ramifications than he realised.

Also thirty years ago something terrible happened to Paul Rogers which changed his life forever. As part of a top-secret project, based in Building Q of Fort Monroe, his body was altered to give him extreme strength, and resilience to pain so that he could perform superhuman tasks, including killing without any conscience. Rogers has just spent the last 10 years in jail for murder and with his parole determines to seek out and deliver vengeance to those who were responsible for his condition.

The stories involve huge coverups at the highest level which are continuing to the present day. Puller and Knox get pulled into the middle of this highly sensitive arena while Rogers is trying to hunt down the people who harmed him so long ago.  Baldacci carefully weaves together the stories until they converge.

I have read most of Baldacci's books and enjoy his writing. But this time I think he has stepped too far out of reality to get a top rating. You certainly need a need a reality check to enjoy some of the fantasy that Baldacci has created. IMHO the book has also been poorly edited as there are a lot of things that happen, especially at very high levels of government, that are not explained by the end of the book - maybe a consequence of meeting tough publication deadlines. In previous books in the John Puller series, there was an interesting personal relationship between Puller and Knox which was hardly an issue in this one.

David Baldacci: The Winner

An entertaining fantasy thriller
During the drought season of new releases at the beginning of the calendar year I revisited a number of best-selling books that I had read many years ago. THE WINNER is the third standalone book by David Baldacci released in 1998 which immediately became a best-seller. It is still a pretty good read and an entertaining fantasy thriller.

The fantasy setting has dirt-poor single mother LuAnn Tyler winning about $100 million in the national lottery. The real fantasy is that LuAnn had been selected by a clever sociopath who could fix the winning numbers. LuAnn had been given a deadline to accept the offer and the sociopath ("Mr Jackson", a master of disguise) had arranged for her to be eliminated if she didn't accept on time.

Minutes before accepting LuAnn walks into her run-down trailer and finds her deadbeat partner has just been shot over a drug deal. She hits the assassin with a phone and thinks she has killed him. On the run, she calls Jackson and agrees to the deal. Jackson helps her with a disguise and a new identity and she and her daughter escape to live overseas with an understanding that she will never return to the USA. Over several years, Jackson invests the money very successfully and shares the gains with her so LuAnn becomes a very wealthy person.

Jackson reminds her that she should never come back to the US. But after 10 years LuAnn is sick of living overseas and desperately wants to return to the US. When she does this without Jackson's knowledge he is very angry and threatens to punish her and her daughter. The plot then twists and turns as the FBI and the IRS are searching for her in connection with the lottery scam and tax avoidance and Jackson tries to take retribution.

The only help comes from the mysterious Matthew Riggs who has contracted to build a security fence for her. Of course, a strong attraction builds between Riggs and LuAnn.

This is an entertaining fantasy thriller with an unbelievable and very dangerous sociopath pulling the strings. Baldacci went on to write many successful series but some of the early standalone ones are still among his best.

David Baldacci: Absolute Power

An oldie but a goodie
During the drought season of new releases at the beginning of the calendar year I am revisiting a number of best-selling books that I had read many years ago. ABSOLUTE POWER is the first book that David Baldacci released in 1996 which immediately became a best-seller. It is still a pretty good and somewhat different thriller.

Luther Whitney has had a long-term career as a successful jewel thief and only burgles houses of the rich who can afford the loss. For some time, he has carefully planned a break-in to the house of a mega-rich man who has given his much younger beautiful trophy wife a lot of very expensive jewellery.  Luther knows that the owners plan to be away. The break-in goes well and he quickly overcomes the hi-tech security system. In the main bedroom, he stumbles on a walk-in safe with a mirror door which stores the wife's jewellery. Suddenly he hears several cars arriving and quickly hides in the cupboard which is big enough to have an easy chair. Imagine his surprise when he finds that the mirror is transparent and he can see everything happening in the bedroom but they can't see him.

Luther then sees the beautiful wife about to make love to an older, and familiar looking man. Their lovemaking gets violent and the man gets angry and tries to strangle the woman. In self-preservation, she stabs the man with a letter opener. His security detail rush into the room and shoot and kill her. The man passes out with too much alcohol. A woman comes into the room and takes charge as the security men clean up the room of any clues to the killer - fingerprints, vacuuming carpets and even digging out one of the bullets from the wall.

No one is aware that Luther has seen all of the action. He is scared stiff because he recognised that the man is the US President, the second woman his Chief of Staff and the security men are Secret Service. The story kicks along when Luther decides that he needs to tell someone about what actually happened, but at the same time protect himself from danger.

Baldacci has written a very different fictional thriller about the US President and the corruption of power. The plot has many twists and turns, some of the in the unbelievable category, but overall it was a compelling and entertaining piece of fiction.

David Baldacci: The Guilty

Will Robie, the hit man, still has a conscience
This is #4 in David Baldacci's bestselling series about Will Robie, the hit man with a conscience. I had wondered how Baldacci could keep this kind of series going. His answer is to make it personal and go back to Robie's early days.

While a major hit by Robie is successful, the collateral damage of the death of a young boy by the same bullet is too emotional for Robie to take. He is not able to complete his next assignment.

His controller tells him to take a break and get himself together again. At the same time, he tells him that his estranged father has been arrested for murder. Reluctantly Robie goes back to the small Missippi town that he left over 20 years ago to find out what has happened. Robie has to face up to his past and the estranged father who physically and mentally abused him for so many years.

I enjoyed the first half of the book (3.5 stars) as Robie adjusts again to life in the small deep-south town he abandoned a long time ago. Many things have changed. His father is now a Judge, has remarried a beautiful woman around Robie's age and has a 3-year-old son (so he has a stepmother and stepbrother).   He starts to come to grips with the past and tries to work out if he can help his father - the only way to get his father released is to find the actual murderer. But his father is not very enthusiastic about his help.

The second part of the book is basically a third-rate whodunit (2 stars). When his colleague Jessica Reel comes to help him the body count escalates. Robie and Reel discover more murders, blackmail, pedophilia, incest, and consanguinity. Of course along the way they get ambushed and chased by the baddies. The eventual exposure of the murderer was so ridiculous that I actually laughed out loud.

The main saving grace is that at the end Robie stands out as an honorable and caring individual - once again an hit man with a conscience.

David Baldacci: Memory Man

Agonies of a perfect memory
Over the years David Baldacci has created a range of interesting characters and this one is probably one of the most unusual. Amos Decker was involved in a serious violent football tackle where he died twice and woke up with hyperthymesia (an exceptional memory of everything that happens).

Amos - the "Memory Man"- went on to become an excellent detective (helped by his great recall of details). One evening he returns home and finds his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law have been brutally murdered. Amos's world collapses as he is not able to forget anything about that night - his mind replays things like a DVD. He just avoids suicide, quits his job, and becomes homeless. Eventually he pulls himself together sufficiently to set up as a PI and earn enough to live in a low-cost Motel.

Amos is a pretty forbidding character, six-five, and has let himself go - fifty pounds overweight, shaggy and initially bearded. Because of his "gifts" his social skills are lacking (he's a bit of  a UK TV's Doc Martin).

Horrific murders happen at the local high school and Amos is asked by the local police chief to help because they a don't have a clue how the killer got into or out of the school. At the same time a strange man confesses to the police that he murdered Amos's family, but was in police custody at the time of the murders. Amos has to take better control of himself as the two tragedies slowly converge and he is the only person who can unravel what has happened.

Baldacci has written a complex, frequently confused story about a huge man with a huge memory who is struggling to understand and survive huge emotional traumas. The plot meanders and loses direction and sometimes passes the believability level. The book it is listed as a standalone but the ending suggests that Baldacci plans to bring Amos back and it seems to me that he has edited parts at the last moment to allow this to happen. This is very confusing - I am not sure if this is a good idea as Baldacci has several other good characters around (for example, Will Robie, the hitman with a conscience, is coming back in November).

David Baldacci: The Escape

Puller vs Puller
David Baldacci returns again this year with an exciting thriller, the third of his series about John Puller, a former war hero who is one of the best military investigators in the US Army's Criminal Investigative Division. This time Puller is faced with one of the most dangerous and controversial cases in his career - to find a maximum security prisoner from the Leavenworth Military Prison who has made a miraculous escape and left an unknown dead body in his cell. The case is controversial because the escapee is Puller's elder brother Bobby who was convicted by a military court of  serious national security crimes.

The first couple of chapters about how the escape happened set the scene for an absorbing chase to find how and why the escape happened and to find and arrest Bobby. What is surprising is that a trio of top military brass ask Puller to find his brother and bring him back for justice especially as Bobby has an almost eidetic memory of important military secrets. Puller soon finds that the whole thing reeks of conspiracy at the highest level with possible overseas influence within the security agencies of the US.Also he soon not sure if Bobby was actually guilty of the crimes for which he was imprisoned.

Puller is normally a loner but he is forced to work with enigmatic (and of course attractive) US intelligence officer, Captain Veronica Knox who he has problems trusting. Of course she has problems trusting Puller, especially about how will react when they finally hunt down his brother. The plot has many twists and turns and is absorbing reading. As with other recent Baldacci thrillers the plot sometimes verges on the unbelievable but this time it doesn't go over the believability barrier too much.

After THE FORGOTTEN Baldacci has brought John Puller back from looking like a Jack Reacher clone to his military CID roots. Baldacci has the talent to create a number of very different and compelling lead characters and Puller is now towards the top of the list. My main reservation is that Puller is not as charismatic as some of the other ones - especially Oliver Stone and the Camel Club. The finale certainly sets the scene for an interesting return sometime later on.

David Baldacci: The Target

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Another busy time for the Hit Team
This is the third in the Will Robie series about a CIA hit man who finds he has a bit of a conscience about what he is doing. It is the second featuring Jessica Reel, another CIA assassin who is as good, if not sometimes better, than Robie. Any politico/CIA assassin thriller like this one needs to be read with your believability escapist button pressed.

Robie and Reel are still teamed up (platonically) after "The Hit" where Reel went rogue to prevent world disaster planned by senior people in Washington including the CIA. While both of them have been awarded top secret CIA medals for stopping the disaster, the current head of the CIA, Evan Tucker, is still uncomfortable with what happened. When an assignment of impeachable impact is ordered by the President, Tucker first wants to "recalibrate" his top assassins at the CIA's Burner Box training facility. This recalibration goes far further than anyone expected making them think that Tucker would not be concerned if they didn't return from their next assignment.

This time the focus is also on the personal history of Jessica Reel and this takes up an unnecessarily big chunk of almost unrelated plot. The rest is focussed on the real assignment and its aftermath. The story has a little of everything for fans of escapist adventure - high jinks on death row, kidnapping, neo-Nazis, North Korean concentration camps and trained assassins, Presidential guilt trips and payback time. Of course the body count is substantial. At times some of this was too much for my believability barometer to cope with (especially when Robie and Reel became role models for the President's children).

The crux, but not the detail, of the finale was pretty clear a long time from the end of the book. Baldacci left a number of pointers in the book to suggest that another is planned.

As usual with Baldacci, this was page-turning action which will be lapped up by his many fans. However this time I finished up a bit disappointed (3.5 stars) because the story verged too much into the unbelievable with a lot of unnecessary padding.

David Baldacci: King and Maxwell

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Another Bestseller by Baldacci
Once again David Baldacci shows that he is a consummate author of popular thrillers in a page-turning adventure featuring two of his most popular characters, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell - former Secret Service agents turned private investigators. This book will undoubtedly become a pre-Christmas bestseller.

King and Maxwell are driving through a storm when they nearly hit a teenage boy, Tyler Wingo, wandering the highway in the dark. They find that he has fled his nearby home after hearing that his father has been killed in Afghanistan. When they take him home it is clear that Tyler is on his own as there is no love lost with his stepmother.

Next day Tyler contacts them directly and hires them to find out more about his father's death. He tells them he is concerned because he has been told by the Army that there will be no casket as his father's remains are not recognisable. What Tyler doesn't tell them is that he has received a carefully worded email with a coded message from his father - sent after the time he was said to have been killed.

King and Maxwell start to uncover an international incident that begins with the loss of an unknown cargo of 4,800 lbs in a remote part of Afghanistan and the disappearance of Tyler's father. They discover a cover-up that implicates the Pentagon and even higher and become part of a chase to find Tyler's father, uncover the truth and the conspirators. The chase will put their lives at risk many times and claim many lives before it ends in a deadly showdown .

In this book Baldacci explores the special relationship between Sean and Michelle, and Sean's reaction when she was in hospital with serious gunshot wounds from their last adventure. This time Baldacci also introduces us to Sean's ex-wife Dana, in a more than cameo role as the wife of a 2 star General at the Pentagon. He explores Sean and Dana's past life and their relationship when they meet again.

One of David Baldacci's great strengths is his ability to create and ring the changes between a number of compelling characters (including The Camel Club, John Puller, and my recent favourite, Will Robie). It is great to see the return of King and Maxwell after a break of a couple of years. Their adventures with the Secret Service and as private investigators have been some of Baldacci's most successful thrillers over the last 10 years.

PS I was browsing next year's pre-orders on Amazon recently and found that Will Robie (recently featured in "The Hit") will be back at the end of April 2014 in "The Target".
 

David Baldacci: The Hit

"The Hit" is David Baldacci at his brilliant best - a page turning action thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat right through to the very end.

Once again we meet Will Robie (from "The Innocent"), a larger than life cold-blooded professional killer for the US government. Robie is given his hardest and most dangerous assignment yet - to hunt down and eliminate rogue fellow assassin Jessica Reel who has killed her handler and is systematically killing associates. Reel is especially deadly because she is almost Robie's match as a professional killer.

His thoughts on the assignment are simple - "Sending a killer to catch a killer actually made sense. We talk a different language and we see the world through a separate prism that no one else could possibly understand....So Reel dead, or me. It really was that simple. And also that complicated."

As with most of Baldacci's stories, nothing is as it seems and the plot has more exciting twists and turns than a fast paced game of snakes and ladders and nobody can be trusted. Along the way Robie encounters booby traps, firebombs, ambushes and big games of double-cross and conspiracy.

Over the years Baldacci has built an unenviable collection of amazing characters and Will Robie is amongst the best, especially because at rare times he does show some signs of humanity and trust in others. Robie painfully reflects on the conflict between being a killer and being a human being. "The only problem is, I can't be both". As you get to know her, Jessica Reel is another complex and compelling character.

This book is David Baldacci at his best with great actions and characters. Highly recommended - it will keep you guessing to the end so sit back and make time to read this book because once you are hooked it will be hard to put down.

        

David Baldacci: Zero Day

One of Baldacci's best
While I was saddened to see the end of the great Camel Club series, "Zero Day" shows that David Baldacci can write all kinds of imaginative thrillers. This book was a page-turner from start to finish and fully deserves a 5 star rating.

Sergeant John Puller is a former war hero and now one of the best military investigators in the US Army's Criminal Investigative Division. He turned down West Point to stay where he wanted in the Army - where the action is not where the management happens. He is a skilled and extremely clever operator and was puzzled when he was selected to investigate an extremely important and very sensitive case on his own when a senior member of Defence Intelligence and all of his family are brutally murdered in a very remote coal mining area of West Virginia.

A local female detective Samantha Cole is also investigating the case and soon finds that she is out of her depth and needs Puller's expertise and investigatory skills to progress the case. Their investigations uncover more murders, and attempts are made on their lives. The sleepy rural backwater turns into a battleground of deception, murders, bombs, assassination and threats to national security. Baldacci weaves an unstoppable tale that leave one on the edge of the seat until the very end.

Some reviewers have commented on the similarities between Baldacci's John Puller to Lee Child's Jack Reacher. In this book I think this is a bit unfair as Puller is much more of a dedicated Army team-playing detective than Reacher and shows few signs of becoming a loner. However I re-visited this book after reading "The Innocents" where, unfortunately Baldacci turns Puller into a bit of a Reacher clone.

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Great ride on the Baldacci Camel
This is the third and arguably the best of the David Baldacci's highly imaginative and successful Camel Club series. To understand the series you should know a bit about the bizarre collection of members of the Camel Club:

* Oliver Stone - an alias for a retired clandestine CIA operative who maintains a church cemetery in Washington and lives in the caretaker's cottage in the cemetery grounds.

* Rheuben Rhodes - a former DIA worker and marksman who now works unloading trucks.

* Caleb Shaw -  a twin PhD who works in the rare book Wing of the Library of Congress and has a penchant for wearing 19th Century fashion.

* Milton Farb - an obsessive-compulsive prodigy with an eidetic memory who can remember cards and numbers and can win extremely large amounts of money at Casinos.

* Alex Ford - (occasional member) a Secret Service agent who is a member of the President's security squad.

*Annabelle Conroy - (new member) a compulsive thief who runs scams on people and Casinos to steal large amounts of money.

In this adventure Annabelle has conned vicious Casino king Jerry Bagger out of millions. Stone and his colleagues Reuben, Milton, and Caleb marshal all their resources to protect Annabelle.

At the same time someone is slowly killing members of Stone's old clandestine squad one by one and is zeroing on Stone, who has to revert to his old trade to save his life and some of his old colleagues.

As usual Baldacci weaves a devious tale of how this mostly amateur group deal with a range of dangerous happenings, revenge, conspiracy and murder which are the core of all of the great Camel Club series.

David Baldacci: The Forgotten

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John Puller - Baldacci's new Jack Reacher
Now that Oliver Stone and the Camel Club are over, David Baldacci is looking for a key player for a new series. Welcome to Military Criminal Investigator, John Puller Jr, who some of you will have met first in "Zero Day". Puller is basically a military policeman, over 6 feet tall, very athletic and powerful but with battle wounds from active service, great with weapons and a diligent and brilliant investigator. After the traumas of "Zero Day" Puller went off for some post stress R & R -  "He had no map, no plan, no destination".

Does all of this sound a bit familiar, a bit like Jack Reacher? Of course it does. We all love Jack Reacher but after so many iterations his adventures are getting a bit thin and repetitious. So let's see what Puller can offer. Firstly he is still in the military although this adventure starts out as a personal investigation. His aunt who raised him sent a letter saying "people are not being who they seemed". When Puller arrives in Florida he finds that she has been drowned in her back-yard fountain, which the police think is accidental. Puller he gets involved with the local police in trying to convince them that it was murder. Like Zero Day, a simple investigation quickly uncovers  something far more sinister and dangerous.

The finale is fast and furious escapist nonsense with a team of unlikely goodies, including some kick-ass females, taking care of almost a football team of nasty baddies.

Did I enjoy it? Yes because I like Baldacci's page-turning style and characterisation, with well thought-out plot. Did I worry about the Jack Reacher similarity? Yes, because Baldacci should be able to create a new character without apparently having to plagiarize another one. What is my greatest concern? That someone might have plans for a John Puller movie with Tom Cruise in the lead role.

I worried over an appropriate rating and came up with 3.5 stars (somewhere between Amazon's "OK" [3 stars] and "I like it" [4 stars]. In the end because I did enjoy it I rounded it back to 4 stars. Would I read the next Baldacci book, even if it was John Puller again. I think so.

PS (EDITED) Someone who commented pointed out that Lee Child gets a bit of revenge in his latest Reacher book "A Wanted Man", by introducing a dim witted deputy named John Puller. I'm sorry I missed the connection. When Reacher met Puller and found he was a dim wit, he said "Were you dropped on your head as a baby?" ROFL!

David Baldacci: The Innocent

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Baldacci at his best - a plot to keep you guessing to the end
This is David Baldacci at his best - a page turning action thriller that will keep you guessing to the end. Baldacci is a master story tellers of thrillers that have more twists and turns than a fast paced game of snakes and ladders.

Baldacci introduces us to Will Robie, a larger than life professional killer for the US Government (I wonder why we all get turned on with novels about these hypothetical hopefully non-existent super heros). Robie normally has no problem in killing bad people such as terrorists and major criminals. He plans his work meticulously and always makes  contingency plans for escape if something goes wrong.

This time Robie is worried when  he is ordered to kill a divorced woman who doesn't seem to be a danger to anyone. He  enters her bedroom at night and finds her sharing her bed with her young son.  For the first time ever Robie finds that he cannot go through with the killing. Almost immediately a sniper in a nearby building kills both the woman and her son with a single shot.  To save his life Robie flees the scene and following his contingency plan heads for a local bus station.

At the same time a 14 year old girl, Julie, escapes from an abusive foster home and enters her  parents home only to hear both of her drug addicted parents being murdered. The girl escapes the murder scene and catches the same bus as Robie. When someone tries to  kill Julie on the bus, Robie is there to save her life.  Just as they get off the bus together there is a huge explosion, demolishing the bus and killing all of the passengers. Robie and Julie are not seriously injured and form an alliance to keep their safety.

The plot then changes into top gear with both Robie and Julie getting involved in helping the FBI to investigate the murders and bombing, and Robie's superiors who want to find out what went wrong.  The action is fast and furious and keeps you on edge to the very last page.

Baldacci has built up a unenviable collection of amazing characters over the years. Now he has introduced us to Will Robie, a professional killer who finds he has a conscience. I look forward to meeting Robie in future books.