The Guilty

In his development of the character of black ops CIA assassin Will Robie, thriller master David Baldacci revealed in conversation with The Independent that his greatest challenge was ‘to make the reader want to root for somebody who kills people.’ To achieve this, he explained that he made Robie undoubtedly human by showing that, although killing is his job, each hit removes a little part of him. This tension is what fed Baldacci’s imagination for the fourth full-length Will Robie story, which reveals why he left his childhood home of Mississippi over 20 years ago, why he froze during his last operation, and why he can’t return to the field unless he faces up to his past. With the introduction of Robie’s father, a second-rate-lawyer-turned-county-judge who has been arrested for murder, some fans will wonder if the author has conspired to take a side track into Grisham territory. But the narrative quickly doubles back to deliver Baldacci’s sweeping mastery of the thriller genre, with comprehensively realised character arcs and a double twist that shows all that thirty-two novels and sales of over 110 million copies worldwide have taught him about how to sneak up behind his readers and take them, darkly, by surprise.