The Target

February 24, 2014
At the start of bestseller Baldacci’s tense third thriller featuring CIA hit man Will Robie (after 2013’s The Hit), Earl Fontaine, a terminally ill Alabama death row prisoner, plans one last killing that will personally affect Robie and his fellow agent, Jessica Reel. Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., the U.S. president authorizes an operation to assassinate a foreign leader. Evan Tucker, the head of the CIA, recommends Robie and Reel, whose recent exploits have earned them the CIA’s highest medal, for the job. When that mission is scrubbed, Robie and Reel end up attempting a dangerous incursion into North Korea to rescue a couple of prisoners from the notorious Bukchang labor camp, a move that results in North Korea deciding to retaliate against the U.S. on its own territory. In unsparing detail, Baldacci depicts the brutal conditions in the North Korean camp, in particular their impact on 25-year-old Yie Chung-Cha, a prisoner groomed as a deadly assassin. Agent: Aaron Priest, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency.

March 15, 2014
Baldacci picks up where he left off with CIA assassins Will Robie and Jessica Reel in this no-holds-barred tale of perfidy and murder at the highest level. The president, the director of the CIA and the president's national security adviser meet in secret to hatch a plot to kill the dangerous and unpredictable leader of North Korea. Evan Tucker, the slimy CIA head, decides to use Robie and Reel, whose last mission ended in the deaths of other agency personnel. But first he sends them to the Burner Box, a training facility in rural North Carolina, where they're subjected to everything from near-fatal waterboarding to food and sleep deprivation. When a North Korean operative discovers the mission and blows it out of the water, Robie and Reel are sent to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, Julie, a young girl they know from a previous mission that's never fully explained here, is captured by a group of Nazi sympathizers intent on getting to Reel. Baldacci's prose crackles with urgency, and both spies, although psychological messes, are at the tops of their games. But this novel's construction proves both puzzling and distracting: Baldacci spins a compelling, although much of the time improbable, tale revolving around the failed strike at North Korea, taking up about a third of the book. The second third veers into Reel's neo-Nazi past and takes the story so far afield that they seem like different novels. The final third returns to the Korean storyline, with the results being oddly fragmented. Some scenes set in a Korean concentration camp prove the most compelling by far, especially with their heartbreaking descriptions of lives that are almost too terrible to contemplate. Robie and Reel fans will thrill to see their favorite spies back in action, no matter what the setting.

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November 1, 2013

No hint about the plot, but this is hit man extraordinaire Will Robie's third outing, following The Innocent and The Hit. With a 500,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 30, 2014
Baldacci’s new thriller features Will Robie and Jessica Reel, secret agents licensed to kill by the U.S. president. Their officious superior hates them, but they’re just too darned good to dismiss. The novel unfolds in a segmented but connected series of their adventures, several of which lead to a dangerous incursion in North Korea and involve a ferocious hit woman. Aiding and abetting Baldacci’s characters are narrators McLarty and Cassidy, two total pros who have collaborated on other recent Baldacci audios. Here, the former is given the lion’s share of work, narrating the novel and, using minimal shading, providing the voices for Robie (usually calm and collected), the president (unyielding, with just a hint of self-doubt), the head of the CIA (combative, sour, fearful), among others. Cassidy supplies Reel with a steely self-confidence, shifts to a halting Asian accent for the infamous hit woman, and uses a similar but higher-pitched accent for the assassin’s young ward. Bottom line, McLarty and Cassidy get their job done as successfully as Robie and Reel. A Grand Central hardcover.