A bag of twists

One can almost hear the gears turning in David Baldacci’s head as he writes this novel. “Hmm, so I have two almost-superhuman assassins who have completed the most incredible CIA missions over the course of three books. Now I could either do the Tom Clancy thing and get them promoted to higher levels in government, or I could do the Lee Child thing and put them up against conspiracies in small-town USA. Oh, so Lee Child is the flavour of the season? Small-town US it is.”

And so Baldacci picks up themes from Child’s first book — family ties, strangers arriving in small towns, deep-rooted conspiracy — and writes the fourth book in the Will Robie series around them.

Regular readers of Baldacci — or maybe those who read the reviews of his previous work in this paper — will know that Will Robie and Jessica Reel are CIA assassins, and their storylines generally involve secret agent intrigue in exotic locations. But in The Guilty, their story takes a sharp turn.

Robie flubs a mission, and this leads him to realise he has family issues that he needs to work out with his father. Many years earlier, as a teenager, he used to live in a small Mississippi town with his father. He had grown tired of his father’s constant bullying and decided to run away from town. He made plans along with his girlfriend, Laura Barksdale, but at the last moment she had seemingly refused to go with him. He left anyway, putting the past behind him. From there he had stumbled into secret agent training, and never looked back at either his town or his father. Now, he hears that his father has been arrested for murder. Partly to do his duty as a son, and partly to find out why his girlfriend had refused to come along, Robie returns to his small Mississippi hometown.

When he returns, he finds that a lot of things have changed. His father, once poor, is now the county judge, and owns the largest house in the area. He has married again, a young lady half his age, and Robie now has a half-brother. The entire Barksdale family left town mysteriously a few days after Robie himself left. And there have been two murders in town, not one — the first was a young girl earlier, and the accused in that first murder is the victim in the second crime.

Things get even murkier as Robie begins to dig in. To help or hinder him, there are the various small-town characters: the ne’er-do-well son of the victim, Robie’s classmate who is now a policewoman, the lawyer who has a passion for fighting for the underdog, and the mysterious group of out-of-towners who are keeping tabs on everything. And finally, his father, who doesn’t seem to want help even now. His mental image of his son is still the scared teenager who left town decades ago.

There are the many twists and turns in the story that are expected in thriller novels these days. Baldacci’s writing is competent, and he keeps the pages turning. Every sort of thriller element makes an appearance — the FBI, incest/molestation, blackmail, gambling, debts, you name it. Having said that, the emotional core of the book rings hollow. In particular, the story of how Robie decided to move on without his girlfriend feels too pat and out of character. And the big reveal at the end is eye-rollingly weird. The requisite word count is given to the father-son relationship that is supposed to evolve and heal, but the events that trigger that evolution lack punch.

What that leaves us with is a sequence of tense standoffs, fights, FBI plots, and some uncanny shooting by Robie and Reel. Fortunately, these are fun and well-done, just the thing we expect from professional assassins. It’s just not the stuff that makes a book memorable in the long run.

There’s one quirk to this book where Baldacci does well: Robie and Reel, though they are excellent with weapons and in fights, are not that good with detective work. They admit as much, and do find themselves out of their depth on occasion. At the end, the villain, after being caught, gleefully recounts the various clues that Robie missed through the story, and Robie groans in disgust at himself. This kind of self-deprecation is rare in thrillers these days, and it helps to make Robie seem a bit more human.

Overall, though: read or skip? Read only if you are (a) a die-hard David Baldacci fan, or (b) in desperate need of a light book to read on a flight or train journey. Skip if you are willing to hunt beyond the latest bestseller shelves — you will, without much effort, find better written books than this one.