Divine Justice (Camel Club)
- Usual good readI like anything David Baldacci writes, especially his Camel Club series...I found it a page turner...
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- Last of the Camel Club thrillers?DIVINE JUSTICE, the fourth in Baldacci's wildly popular Camel Club series, picks up where the quite literal cliff hanger at the conclusion of STONE COLD left us. Oliver Stone, having just assassinated Carter Gray, head of the CIA, and Roger Simpson, who had raised Stone's daughter after his wife's murder, had just made his tenuous escape by leaping headlong off of a cliff into the frigid, storm-tossed waters of Chesepeake Bay. When he breaks the surface and swims to shore, he knows that in order to stay alive and to protect his friends, he's going to have to go into deep hiding without letting anybody know where he's gone, most especially his dear friends in the Camel Club.
As he did with the other entries in the series, Baldacci uses DIVINE JUSTICE to deftly juggle a double intertwined plot. The first, and most obvious plot, is the government's efforts to hunt down Oliver Stone, almost certainly with the intent to forever silence him and ensure that the lid on past CIA black operations is forever slammed shut.
The second plot involves the rather creepy, clearly underhanded goings on in Divine, the sleepy coal-mining town buried so deep in the Virginia backwoods that he couldn't even get a bus ride into town. Stone imagined it to be the perfect shelter below everybody's radar! But the mysterious deaths and suicides, the federal supermax prison and the coal miners' constant trips to the local methadone clinic raised every hair on the back of Oliver Stone's neck. Something was very, very wrong in Divine, Virginia and he just couldn't leave well enough alone and stay hidden for long!
DIVINE JUSTICE, which may well be the closer, continues a fabulous series that thriller fans will eat up with gluttonous gusto. Annabelle Conroy, Alex Ford and the two surviving members of the Camel Club, Reuben Rhodes and Caleb Shaw, are fully developed as characters and fully brought to life as believable heroes. Readers will cheer their little hearts out as Stone's friends work double-time to find him before the government assassins do.
Highly recommended. No loose ends or cliff hangers in this one, I'm afraid. While the characters still have room to grow, Baldacci hasn't left himself with an obvious plot direction for a fifth novel in the series. I'm crossing my fingers. We'll have to wait and see.
Paul Weiss
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- Divine Justice... but not for the reader?Having read a couple of David Baldacci's books previously, I was expecting quite a lot more with Divine Justice.I guess I'm prepared to overlook the surfeit of minor characters who were all too briefly sketched, and the sometimes clumsy, stilted dialogue, and Stone's contrived and unnecessary love interest with Abby, but.....
The whole "raison d'etre" for Stone arriving in Divine was far, far too left field to swallow!And which kind of wrecked the plot line very early in the piece.Stone is a guy who's been successfully on the run for thirty years from all sorts of desperadoes trying to nail him, including the CIA and FBI, and numerous other government and military agencies.And yet, and yet... after his fight with the three thugs his false ID won't even stand up to scrutiny by a train conductor!This just doesn't ring true at all.In fact it's laughably inept by both thewriter and his protagonist. And later -- to make matters worse plot-wise -- this same train conductor is known personally to the randomly-picked ticketing clerk questioned by Joe Knox, and (unbelievably) also happens to be coming in to write up his paperwork.
Oh, puhleeze!
Way too many similar holes in this plot I'm afraid.
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- Terrible writingIf it wasn't for the plot, I'd rate this 1 star.The writing is elementary at best and the style is very generic.Many lines and descriptions are very cheesy and a little bigoted at times.
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- Fantastic AudiobookIntricate mystery story with a lot of twists and turns.Perhaps one of Baldacci's best.The narration is excellent, and there are even some sound effects. This is the unabridged version, and provides several hours of entertainment.
