The Innocent (Will Robie, #1)

by David Baldacci

America's best hitman was hired to kill--but when a D.C. government operation goes horribly wrong, he must rescue a teenage runaway and investigate her parents' murders in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller.

It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to pull the trigger. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and is on the run.

Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn't an ordinary runaway--her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can't walk away. He needs to help her. Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he's convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents' deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.

Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl's life...and perhaps his own.

• ISBN10: 0606351248
• ISBN13: 9780606351249
• Publish Date: 26 February 2013 (first published 1 January 2012)
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: Turtleback Books
• Edition: Bound for Schools & Libraries ed.
• Format: Hardcover (Library Binding)
• Pages: 576
• Language: English

Reviews

[Berls]

4.5 stars
David Baldacci is quickly becoming a favorite author and this first book in the Will Robie series continues that trend. In fact, I think these characters have the potential to become my favorites, over Amos Decker and his friends/team..

Will Robie is a fantastic character and I really enjoyed getting to know the government hitman. He's smart and lethal (as you'd expect) but he's also softer than you'd expect from someone in such a brutal line of work. That humanizing piece made me love him all the more.

The mystery was also fantastic and I was guessing all the way to the end. This has a very different kind of cadence to the Amos Decker series as Robie is not a detective, he's a hitman being forced by circumstances to play detective. And I appreciated that he made mistakes and didn't think like a detective because of that. He's smart but he lacks that element of training and it made the story that much more fun to read.

As I've grown accustomed to with David Baldacci audios, this was narrated in a theatrical style with Ron McLarty doing the male voices and Orlagh Cassidy the female. I tend to find books narrated this way a real treat as you can really get lost in them -- all voices are believable and consistent. Looking forward to listening to the rest of the series.

[bookperson]

Entertaining read but felt like every character was placed into the story to move the plot.