Another Baldacci. Ho Hum, Right? Not So Fast.

I have read somewhere between 1/2 million and 3/4 million David Baldacci books.  Okay, it's more like 25.   But a lot.  Wish You Well is in my top 12 all-time.  I absolutely loved The Camel Club series and a whole bunch of his standalones.  I'm not a big fan of the King & Maxwell series and just recently decided to can it, even though I had the latest one in my TBR pile.  Now we come to #3 in the Will Robie series.

Book 1 is The Innocent.  It's mostly about Will Robie, a 40-something assassin who is working for the government, and Julie Getty, a 15-year old runaway, who form a very unlikely partnership.  I really really liked this book.

Book 2 is The Hit.  This is Will and Jessica Reel, a fellow assassin, who are pitted against each other and end up collaborating.  I liked this one, but not nearly as much as book 1. Because I loved the relationship between Will and Julie.

Book 3 is The Target.  This is Will and Jessica AND Julie.  I'm much happier now.  I like Jessica more this time, and am very happy that Julie gets a bigger role.  In fact, just about every sequence that has Julie in it produces tears for me.  I don't know what else to say about that.  Julie is a character that I care about more than almost any other character in fiction.  Crazy, no?

The plot is basically unimportant, just like it is for most series.  But that doesn't mean that I don't have anything to say about the book (big surprise there, eh?).  Because I do. Occasionally, I like to list the parts of a book that I like.  I'm going to do that here.

1.  Lots of twists and turns.
2.  Even though you know that the main characters will come out of this okay, he makes you worry.
3.  He gives a great evaluation of the CIA infrastructure that really helped me, at least, better understand the organization.
4.  He has a couple of very significant mini-plots that are almost stories-within-stories.
5.  There's 1 sub-plot in which a foreign government plants a spy many years in advance of the denouement (ok, come on - how cool of a word is that?).  It reminds me of Silva's The Unlikely Spy and Alex Berenson's The Faithful Spy (do you, perhaps, sense a theme here?).
6.  There's a character named Lloyd Carson.  Do you know how many times I run across my name in books?  That's almost never.

I admit that #6 is a bit bogus, but the other 5 are all strong features for me.  And this book is a solid 3.5/4.  It's not quite at the level of The Camel Club, but it's getting close.