David Baldacci's Will Robie series
Book series review
Baldacci keeps turning out interesting books even though he is producing a big number of books regularly. The Innocent does not have the familiar protagonists Baldacci likes to write about (e.g. Oliver Stone, Maxwell & King). It is the story of a contract killer, Will Robie, who works for a clandestine agency within the bowels of the U.S. government to eliminate threats that can not be handled through regular means. One of his missions goes awry when he refuses to kill the woman he is assigned to kill, as a sniper kills the woman and her child.
While trying to find out what has happened and escaping certain death due to his refusal to carry out his mission, Robie teams up with a teenage girl who has just witnessed her mother being killed. Right afterwards they escape together from a bus with a killer targeting one of them when the bus abruptly explodes.
The story is complex and the plot is elaborate, so Baldacci comes up with another enjoyable book, albeit not extraordinary for him.
In The Hit, Baldacci continues the story of Will Robie, a super-secret government killer/assassin who performs Black Ops type of kills on opponents of the government. Will Robie was introduced in The Innocent where he had detected some strange events during a routine kill and he had then encountered a young girl whose family was brutally murdered and had taken her into his protection.
This new book starts with Will Robie being given the task to pursue one of his fellow assassins, Jessica Reel, who has killed two of the colleagues in the covert organisation planning the hits and has gone outside the grid. While Robie is trying to match wits and skills with someone as good as himself, he is also starting to see some strange patterns. Has Jessica been turned by a foreign nation/Agency or is there something else to the series of murders that Jessica or someone else might be performing?
Conspiracy theories, terrorism, enmity and competition between rival security agencies all come together in this fast-moving thriller. Baldacci still has the appeal Tom Clancy lost at the end - with his collaboration books that read more like they are written by ghost writers rather than the witty original Clancy fans liked a lot. Admittedly the plot alternatives are getting a bit scarce, but still Baldacci proves a good read any time.
The Target, a complex and interesting book, has Will Robie in the lead and is about North Korean assassins targeting the U.S. and the Presidential Family. With the North Korean hacking event just before Christmas of 2014, it looks like another case of life imitating art...
Robie and Reel work together to solve the issue, while a new and dangerous opponent targets them.
Baldacci’s books are notorious for a flowing narrative, a lot of action and some twists and turns, so they are an easy read.
The series continues with two more books, The Guilty and The End Game, which I intend to cover in the future.
