Deliver Us from EvilDavid Baldacci
Grand Central Publishing, April 2010
ISBN: 978-0446564083
A monstrous old man with plenty of “enemies and ailments” is killed by a woman known to the man as Barbara (a.k.a. Regina Campion), a seductive companion who is obsessed with the brutal fact of life that “there will always be monsters.” Because of Regina’s employment with a shadowy group of justice-minded enthusiasts, her mission in life is simply stated: She and her cohorts are determined “to hunt down every one” of life’s evil monsters.
A man known only as Shaw, currently working for Frank Wells (the manager of “an agency that doesn’t officially exist”) and now tasked with tracking down and eliminating “folks who desperately deserved it.”
As highly motivated “vigilantes” with different employers and different motivations, Regina and Shaw—“playing the roles of judge, jury, and executioner”—are on a collision course because an ostensibly “legitimate and highly successful businessman [. . . named Evan Waller [a.k.a. Fedir Kuchin] is instead] a mass murderer and war criminal who seems determined to add to his considerable list of sins by selling nuclear materials to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
So it is that Regina and Shaw find themselves embroiled in a “[d]amn inconvenient coincidence, going after the same scoundrel at the same time for different reasons.” Their quest, however, is further complicated by their slowly developing realization that the “potential for evil lurks in all of us.”
Baldacci is a master of character development. He does a superb job in depth colorizing of his protagonists. Monsters are all the rage. Baldacci shows us that supernatural monsters aren’t really the scariest ones. It is definately a must read!
