Book Reviews, Comments & Stories, Quotes, & Poetry & More
"Connections and Why They Matter"
Most of what happens in our life will spark a connection. Life connects with what has been found in books. Books connect with what happens in life. Use the connections to help you see more clearly. A love of reading and writing is what motivated the creation of this blog. Thank you for coming to the blog.
As you would expect in a book titled “The Hit,” it is about a plan to kill a target by, in this case, not one but two assassins. Both Will Robie and Jessica are highly trained killers, but one has gone “rogue” and is killing members of the CIA, the agency that trained them both. Robie is assigned to track her down and bring her in, dead or alive. His direct reports feel that hiring a killer to kill a killer is their only and best solution.
Reel’s targets seem unconnected, with one being a handler and the other the Deputy Director of the CIA. Still, we eventually learn of a larger conspiracy that, if not stopped, could send shock waves through the U. S. government and around the world.
Reel and Robiestartarareoppositeesidese,s but it turns out both sides may be their enemy.
“toward the small pond that he had seen before. The walls of fire ended there. An instant later, the remains of the cottage exploded. He ducked and rolled again from the concussive force, almost pitching into the right side of the wall of fire. He rose and redoubled his efforts, thinking he would reach the water. Water was a great antidote to fire. But as he neared the edge of the pond, something struck him. No scum. No algae on the surface, although the ground around was full of it. What could kill green scum? And why was he being forced to run right toward the one thing that could save him? Robie tossed his gun over the top of the wall of flames, pulled off his jacket, covered his head and hands with it, and threw himself through the wall of flames on the left side.”
“The motorcades drifted down the street with Canadian police providing the traffic security. There were several Canadian Mounties on their horses; they looked resplendent in their red uniforms. But they were also brightly colored sitting ducks when it came to an actual armed confrontation.”
“What happened to you as a child, particularly something bad, changed you, absolutely and completely. It was like a part of your brain became closed off and refused to mature. As an adult, you were powerless to fight against it. It was simply who you were until the day you died. There was no “therapy” that could cure it. That wall was built, and nothing could tear it down.”
Amos Decker, the memory man, 22-year-old and NFL rookie, was struck on the field that he died twice, ending his football career. The injury-induced hypothermia and synesthesia, and he becomes a different person for the rest of his life and will forget nothing. After some help at a particular rehabilitation institute for those like him, he becomes a cop and a detective.
Years later, his wife, daughter, and brother-in-law are brutally murdered in his home. He can’t continue as a cop and becomes a private investigator. He has hit bottom, is grossly overweight, and, in his way, grief-stricken.
Sebastian Leopold walks into the police station and confesses to the killing of his family. While he is in jail, a mass shooting occurs at a local high school. Decker, I pulled back to working with his old partner and the police department to solve the killings; a surprising link that connects the school killings with those of his family opens up the plot with twists and turns to leave questions that are only answered at the very end.
A well-done story, the first in a series for the Amos Decker character.
FBI special agent Pine’s twin sister, Mercy, was taken from the room they shared as young children. “It’s seared into Atlee Pine’s memory; the kidnapper’s chilling rhyme as he choase between six-year-old Atlee and her twin sister, Mercy. Mercy was taken, Atlee was spared.” The story starts with Agent Pine going to visit the killer in the supermax prison ADX in Florence Colorado, but her home base is in the remote parts of the Southwest.
Atlee has never stopped searching for her sisters’ body and the survivor’s guilt has led her to spent her life hunting down those who hurt others. She has just been assigned to investigate a case in the Grand Canyon when a mule is found dead with strange carvings on its body, and its rider missing.
The search for the missing rider takes her across country and involves a plot that is a threat to the entire world by a monster she had never considered.
This is the first book in David Baldacci’s new Atlee Pine thriller series. A good start.
Quotes
“Justice. It wasn’t about the greater good. It was about what was right and wrong on an individual basis. Person by person. Because if you neglected the people, the idea of a greater good was a pipe dream created by those whose idea of the “greater good” almost always tended to favor themselves and people like them.”
“For me, the Canyon isn’t just a tourist destination. It’s a living, breathing place. It has a dozen plants that live nowhere else.
“She’d heard that the author Margaret Mitchell had never lived in a place with more than one bedroom for a simple reason: She had never wanted houseguests.”
“narcissist. People often discounted narcissism as relatively harmless because the term sometimes conjured the clichéd image of a vain man staring longingly at his reflection in a pool of water or a mirror. However, Pine knew that narcissism was probably one of the most dangerous traits someone could possess for one critical reason: The narcissist could not feel empathy toward others. Which meant that the lives of others held no value to a narcissist. Killing could even be like a hit of fentanyl: instant euphoria from the domination and destruction of another. That was why virtually every serial murderer was also a narcissist.”
