Thriller will keep readers guessing
At the end of David Baldacci’s “The Guilty,” readers left professional CIA assassin Will Robie in his home state of Mississippi. He’d wrapped up a deadly investigation in which he had to revisit his complicated relationship with his father and work alongside the equally competent assassin Jessica Reel, his soul mate in more ways than one.
As “End Game,” the fifth installment in this Baldacci thriller series begins, Robie and Reel are on assignments in different parts of the world: He is attempting to thwart a terrorist attack in London, and she is leading a team in a failing mission against ISIS in Iraq.
They both survive, of course, and are reunited in the United States, charged with finding their handler — code name “Blue ■ Man” — who has gone missing in his hometown of Grand, Colorado.
Robie is uncomfortable working again with Reel. Despite their closeness in Mississippi, he has heard nothing from her for months, then finds a terse note left in his hotel room.
As they begin the search for Blue Man, they end up in a small Western town that’s short on law-enforcement officials and long on fringe militant groups operating by their own set of rules. Was Blue Man abducted by neo-Nazis, a religious group called the Apostles or someone from his past? Robie and Reel realize how little they know about their handler’s history and personal life.
The local sheriff is the tough and attractive Valerie Malloy, who develops an attraction for Robie. She catches him up on the locals, including Blue Man’s high- school sweetheart; the odd leader of the Apostles, a neo-Nazi leader who calls himself “Dolph”; and the slick developer of milliondollar doomsday condos, built in an abandoned government missile silo.
Baldacci weaves together enough characters and plot twists to provide multiple red herrings that keep readers guessing about who the real villains are and what their criminal intent is.
It’s a big one.
Baldacci — who publishes two books a year and keeps more than a halfdozen series afloat — can be counted on for page-turners. “End Game” supplies added thrills with its three main action sequences: the individual heart-pounding maneuvers of Robie and Reel at the beginning of the book and their odds-againstthem battle with the bad guys at the end.
Bodies pile up during a climactic hunt scene, and all is not revealed until the last pages.
The Will Robie series — which began in 2012 with “The Innocent” — has always been long on action and short on philosophy. But in “End Game,” both Robie and Reel contemplate their killing selves and how that negates chances for normal lives. The intense, if brief, soul searching adds a bit of welcome depth.