Finished Sa 3/11/2020
This is a paperback that Janny loaned to me.
This is the last of 'The Camel Club' series. Oliver Stone, his real name is John Carr, formed a group of political watchdogs that are always looking for conspiracies. The group is composed of a half dozen people who have various areas of expertise. John Carr was formally involved with a secret assassination wing of the CIA know as 'The Triple Sixes'.
PLOT EXPLAINED:
The novel begins with an explosion in Layette Park. A park in Washington DC directly across from the White House. Four People in the park; Woman who worked nearby is sitting on a bench talking to her lover, an overweight Hispanic runner who dives into a hole that was left open to plant a tree, an important international double agent, and Oliver Stone.
The woman who worked in a building near the explosion is the bad guy.
Stone and the authorities are stymied as to the reason for the explosion. Right after the blast, a group of terrorists opened fire with automatic weapons, but they were firing blindly. Why?
The reason for the attack is to test an application of 'nanobots'. They are trying to develop a way to render illegal goods undetectable by smell. This would allow the South American cartels a way to smuggle guns, drugs, atomic material, and anything else through the toughest security measures with zero chance of being detected.
The whole 'explosion exercise' was designed to see if the many police dogs in Lafayette Park were able to detect the smell of a bomb. So the blast was secondary to finding whether or not the nanobots masked the smell.
There were a million plot twists and turns and many red herrings.
The plot percolates right along, but the characters are mere cutouts or shells. I prefer novels with very rich character development and Baldacci is not known for this.
All of Baldacci's stuff is very readable, but never rises to a level higher than an 'airport or beach read'.
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