I don’t read many thrillers, but I had a couple reasons for selecting this book. First of all, last year I took the Master Class and Mr. Baldacci gave great classes on writing and marketing. He’s a lawyer who doesn’t sell worldwide rights. He works with each country independently and probably increases his profits a great deal. The second reason is because my local library was having a $1 a book sale, and I added it to my stack.
The Forgotten is an exciting book. When the hero, an Army CID police officer is sent to Paradise, Florida, to check on his aunt by his retired Army general father, he discovers she has died from an apparent accident. I was reminded a lot of Reacher because our hero, John Puller, is large, strong, and dedicated. He carries a gun and angers the local cops when he starts investigating his aunt’s death as a possible murder. Only one policewoman is willing to listen to his theory that something bad is going on in Paradise.
Instead of a villain, Puller shares the novel with another large, competent man, Mecko. He escapes from a human trafficking ring to try and find his enslaved sister. The Bulgarian giant, Mecko, goes undercover as an itinerant landscaper for a super-rich financier (the real villain and head of the human trafficking ring). You don’t know how the two forces are going to collide, but Mecko does save Puller’s life when Puller rescues some children from a street gang. I’ve never read a book where there are two heroes working parallel to each other. Of course, the aunt’s murder is connected to the human trafficking ring by the end.
The second atypical surprise is the women. The rich man is having sex with the beautiful partner of an associate. She is spying on the rich man and keeps bumping into Mecko, also spying on the rich man. Puller turns down a night with the lady cop but gets involved with a one-star general who comes to check on him. When they all discover they’re working toward the same goal, a group of men, women, and children is kidnapped and shipped out to an abandoned oil platform off the coast. To add more tension, there’s a hurricane and a mole impeding the four gun-slinging agents.
As much as I enjoyed the story (and the clever four-page chapters), I had a couple pet peeves. I’ve never been a fan of artificial cliff-hangers. I like a good action or event cliff-hanger but saying things such as “Puller couldn’t have been more wrong” and “the worst was yet to come” is unnecessary. My next qualm is the Diehard Syndrome. Puller is shot, a “through and through” on his side when they initially try to save the kidnapped people, and then NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN. Although he pilots a boat through a hurricane, has two more firefights, and tackles the villain to the ground, it’s NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN.
I like my heroes to take a licking, but I don’t expect them to be super-human. Is a “through and through” bloodless and painless? I don’t think so. I can’t function with an ingrown toenail. I enjoyed the mole being a surprise even though we had all the clues. I hate it when the hero figures it out from clues only he or she knows.
A fast read and a likable hero. There’s absolutely no character development, but like James Bond, he really doesn’t need any. His four-star general father has dementia, his brother is serving a life sentence in prison, and he has a cat. What more development do we need? I probably couldn’t take a steady diet of the terribly vanilla John Puller, but it was an easy and quick thriller.
Thank you, Mr. Baldacci.