The Innocent by David Baldacci (2012. Grand Central. ISBN 978-1-4555-1900-2)
After I closed the cover on this paperback for the last time, this was my final thought: At least I didn’t pay for it. My Aunt Susanne, a fellow writer, handed this book to me a year or so ago and said, “You might like this.” She was wrong.
I’ve never read Baldacci, a mass market paperback guru of the action/suspense/thriller genre. After forcing myself to finish The Innocent, I will never waste my time on his work again. There is so much to say about the messed up, nonsensical plot, the characters, the improbabilities, the awkward mandatory sex scene (intimated, not directly depicted), and the clunky dialogue of a teenage damsel in distress that I’d exhaust myself working through it all. I won’t. I’ll just give you my basic thought: I don’t use an outline when I write fiction but this guy needs one. It’s that simple. I found the meandering plot, which begins with Will Robie, a U.S. government sanctioned hit-man taking out a Middle Eastern type, and ends with a furious shoot-out at the White House, so disjointed and tactically implausible (really, a guy (Robie) wanders into a state dinner where the President and the Saudi Crown Prince are about to dine carrying two loaded handguns, fires off a round to save them both, and he isn’t immediately taken out by the Secret Service despite their having no knowledge he’s a friend, not a foe?). The would be assassin (spoiler alert) is a slight, petite, secretary and she is able to cold cock a Secret Service agent and steal his weapon and smuggle it into the dinner with impunity? In the White House? And this kind of suspension of reality permeates the plot until you are thinking, Maybe Superman will suddenly appear too!
I found the Robie character boring. No class, no sophistication, no nothin’. Definitely no James Bond or Jason Bourne. He’s a cardboard hero with no depth, soul, or meaning, like the rest of the book. To me, this novel is all about the payday, not in terms of the plot’s climax but in terms of the author’s wallet. I’m not so high minded that I can’t enjoy a good mystery or potboiler or legal thriller or mass market love story. I was a huge fan of Grisham until he too started phoning it in. And no, Mr. Baldacci, this isn’t a semi-famous novelist searching for a reason to denigrate a master. The only thing that this book masters is lining up words into sentences into paragraphs into pages into chapters. Beyond that, it’s pretty much stale, unimaginative, and confused.
422 pages of drivel. That’s my take. About the only positive thing I have to say is that I didn’t toss the novel into the trash in disgust like I did John Irving’s worst work, Until I Find You, or give up 1/4 into the mess, as I did when trying to get through Stephen King’s horrible take on killer clowns, It. We can agree to disagree on this one, folks. But with millions of good books being written, I’ll not waste my precious time on another Balducci. If I want something along these lines, I’ll ask my five year old grandson to tell me a story.
2 stars out of 5. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s about all I can say.
Peace,
Mark
