Robie and Reel fans will thrill to see their favorite spies back in action, no matter what the setting.
Baldacci picks up where he left off with CIA assassins Will Robie and Jessica Reel in this no-holds-barred tale of perfidy and murder at the highest level.
The president, the director of the CIA and the president’s national security adviser meet in secret to hatch a plot to kill the dangerous and unpredictable leader of North Korea. Evan Tucker, the slimy CIA head, decides to use Robie and Reel, whose last mission ended in the deaths of other agency personnel. But first he sends them to the Burner Box, a training facility in rural North Carolina, where they’re subjected to everything from near-fatal waterboarding to food and sleep deprivation. When a North Korean operative discovers the mission and blows it out of the water, Robie and Reel are sent to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, Julie, a young girl they know from a previous mission that’s never fully explained here, is captured by a group of Nazi sympathizers intent on getting to Reel. Baldacci’s prose crackles with urgency, and both spies, although psychological messes, are at the tops of their games. But this novel’s construction proves both puzzling and distracting: Baldacci spins a compelling, although much of the time improbable, tale revolving around the failed strike at North Korea, taking up about a third of the book. The second third veers into Reel’s neo-Nazi past and takes the story so far afield that they seem like different novels. The final third returns to the Korean storyline, with the results being oddly fragmented. Some scenes set in a Korean concentration camp prove the most compelling by far, especially with their heartbreaking descriptions of lives that are almost too terrible to contemplate.
Robie and Reel fans will thrill to see their favorite spies back in action, no matter what the setting.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2123-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
The reason he never met her for the Las Vegas weekend he'd invited her to, ex-colleague Charlie East explains to rolling-stone computer newshound Georgina Powers (Frame Grabber, 1993, etc.) after they've met at McCarran Airport and flown together back to Heathrow, is that he got into a high-stakes poker game he couldn't leave till he was sure of the pot: a million dollars' worth of drams, state-of-the-art computer chips. By this time Georgina has already met two of the other principals who'll figure in Charlie's oh-so-simple-sounding plan to convert the chips to cash and pay her back the ú50,000 he owes her: Hungarian gambler Pal Kuthy of AO Electronix, Charlie's potential buyer; and Shinichro Saito, Georgina's lover, who turns out to be the original seller of the chips. The only missing link is Hiroshi Sano, soon identified as the ``Al Sony'' who lost the chips to Charlie in the first place, even though he was under his company's orders to swap them for some prime Colombian blow. But the Colombians, together with the Japanese, Charlie, and Georgina, are all out of luck, because before Charlie can turn them around, the chips are hijacked from his safe-deposit box—the first of many, many reversals in this spirited round of musical drams. Instead of periodically carting in new characters, Danks just keeps peeling back more layers from her tiny cast's masks. (Those drams are not what they seem either.) The dizzying result is like a video-game version of The Big Sleep programmed by David Mamet—so incessantly brutal and funny (except to the heroine, who spends an awful lot of time getting punched out by people who call themselves her friends) that it ends up being exhausting to read.
Pub Date: Dec. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11355-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
When his friend and lover, Gail Zigman, is raped hours after he leaves her bed for home, Brattleboro, Vt., chief of detectives Lt. Joe Gunther is naturally wild to get on the case. He's grateful when he's assigned to head it in tandem with Todd Lefevre, an investigator for abrasive state's attorney James Dunn. At first, the evidence is slow to come in: Gail didn't have a chance to see anything but her clock, didn't recognize her assailant's voice, and can't imagine who it might have been—unless it's town crank Jason Ryan, who had a royal set-to with Gail at the last selectmen's meeting. Joe takes his share of lumps from townsfolk who can't imagine how he'll run an unprejudiced investigation, but gradually the net closes over a suspect who not only fits the psychological profile of the rapist but comes with a bonus of circumstantial evidence: a house full of damning items, from photos of Gail to a lingerie catalogue mailed to her address. The case seems perfect until Dunn, avid for election-season publicity, leaks information that compromises the case just as Joe's at the point of an arrest. The suspect flees, of course, tries to kill Joe when he's cornered- -and then has the gall, bolstered by a deceptively quiet defender, to protest his innocence. Could Joe's seamless web of evidence have a hole? Mayor alertly turns the greatest weakness of his previous books (The Skeleton's Knee, 1993, etc.)—telltale flaws in the evidence against his perps—into the greatest strength of this tense procedural.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89296-557-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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