Divine Justice (2008)

This is the first of Baldacci's novels I've read. There are a bunch of reader reviews in GoodReads that give reasonably good synopses of the plot, so I'll not go into detail here. I was a little disappointed by the novel, though I also enjoyed it quite a bit.I enjoyed it because Baldacci is a terrific storyteller. He is very good at sucking in the reader in this case with an opening that is suspenseful, unusual, and promises a high-stakes story about the CIA and someone who used to be in the CIA who has just assassinated two high-profile people.What was disappointing to me was the payoff. There were a lot of red herrings here in terms of what the story was really about. Some of the suspense paid off . . . but some of it seemed, in retrospect, to leave this reader wishing there had been more substance involved inb the final solution of the mystery at the core of the story. The author was pretty fair with clues, but he also took what seemed to be shortcuts--there is a love story that starts around a fifth of the way into the novel, but it seems to be "love-story light"--the characters are nicely portrayed, but their attraction seems to develop so quickly that I felt the woman involved really didn't get a fair shake. This was a woman who is portrayed as very strong, but who has suffered a lot of disappointment in her life, and a fair amount of trouble. I thought she fell into bed with the hero of the story more quickly than someone in her situation would, realistically, have done. Obviously, this is my subjective opinion, but she's a Southern woman from a small town, he's a CIA agent who seems to be around twenty years older than her. He comes to her town with her wayward son, shows himself to be secretive, and at the same time does good things, saving the lives of both her son and of his best friend. At the same time, by the end of the book, both young men have died, and one could argue that he didn't ultimately deserve her trust. Moreover, both characters seem to be too protective of their emotions to be able to have a satisfying relationship at the end of the book.The other thing that disappointed me was the fact that the hero, while we're told that he's an enormously skilled agent, can't manage to get the son to say anything at all about what kind of trouble he's in, despite the fact that the agent keeps having to save him from beatings and othe, even more serious trouble. It felt as if the agent could have learned more if he'd tried harder . . . but it wouldn't have suited the author's plan for the story, so he didn't try hard enough to ferret out information that could have ultimately saved the life of the young man.This is the fourth book in the Camel Club series, and I realize that it's hard for an author to make continuing characters seem fresh to new readers, when it is so much easier to rely on what the author has revealed about them in previous books in the series. But for the new reader, it makes the characters frustratingly opaque. It's to Baldacci's credit that even with this frustrations, the characters were appealing and intriguing. But it would have been helpful to have seen some little bits of background about the supporting cast. The writing was serviceable, but not wonderful--but the storytelling made up for that. Even though the story didn't pay off as well as I had hoped, it was nonetheless exciting and gripping. I only wish that some of the characters--like the sheriff who apparently had a crush on the woman who eventually falls into bed with our hero--had been given more complex roles in the overall story. I kept on wondering what was going to happen with the sheriff . . . but he turned out to be simply a good guy (with a very bad-acting brother, who turned out to be the villain of the piece. The core idea was a rather unusual and intriguing one, but it felt, when it was over, as if there might have been more done with it, and that would have made this a really outstanding novel. I am curious to read the first Camel Club novel, to see if it has the same merits but perhaps not the same problems.

I think this was my favorite Camel Club story!

Interesting. Kept me glued