Book Review – Mercy by David Baldacci – The Legacy of Atlee Pine Continues
Table of Contents
My Rating – 4 out of 5
Plot Summary (Storyline) – Mercy
The fourth book of the Atlee Pine series, after A Long Road to Mercy, A Minute to Midnight and Daylight (read the review here) is another fast paced blockbuster. For those not in the know, this being their first Atlee Pine, here’s a little background. Atlee or Lee as she is better known, is an FBI resident agent is Shattered Rock Arizona field office, along with her assistant, Carol Blum. Lee is the solo agent there, and though the first novel focused on her adventures there, subsequent ones have been on finding her twin sister, Mercy. Thirty years ago, Mercy was kidnapped from their family home and never found again.
Pine (Lee) has been on leave from FBI to find her sister after all these years, and during a difficult and troubled investigation, Pine finds that Mercy was abducted and kept as prisoner by Joe and Desiree Atkins, for over ten years and then one night, due to a lapse on Joe’s part, Mercy escapes. Joe was found stabbed to death and Desiree missing. There were no sightings or information on Mercy – not even if she was alive or dead. But Atlee Pine hadn’t given up and having taken leave from FBI, she and Carol Blum began their own investigation to locate Mercy and have now found good leads that might lead to more information about her.
Early on in Mercy, we are told that she is alive but under a different name, Eloise Cain. After escaping from the Atkinses’, she shunned the name given to her by the couple – Rebecca Atkins and became Eloise Cain(or El). Leading a hard life, she is currently homeless, working as a security guard and part-time MMA fighter. Both sisters are tall, athletic and very strong and that helps El in her chosen life. Then one day, she runs into a guy called Ken Buckley who was physically abusing his girlfriend Rosa. Eloise intervenes and in the subsequent fight, Ken is left heavily injured. El leaves him at that, taking Rosa with her.
Eloise, by then, is on the run from the FBI – thinking that the picture that Atlee has put out on the media is to arrest her for Joe’s death. She has no memories of her life before she became Rebecca, except some minute snatches of vision of a mother and some other person called Lee. Meanwhile, Lee and Blum are closing in, locating one after the other people who had any links with Rebecca’s life with the Atkins’. At this time, Ken Buckley (from the fight with Eloise) dies of his injuries, and his influential and moneyed brother, Peter Buckley, finds out that El is behind it. He hires as assassin, Britt Spector, to find and kill Eloise as revenge.
This is where it all heats up, the FBI is looking for Eloise/Rebecca, Pine and Blum are looking for her and now Britt Spector and Peter Buckley are also looking for her – only difference being is that they are the only ones with a lethal intent. Pine and Blum have managed to locate Wanda Atkins, who was aware of what had happened with Pine’s abducted sister and gives them the only lead that Pine’s had in all these years to locate her sister. But can she get to her sister before the killers do? Will she even get to meet her sister?
Conclusion – Book Review of Mercy
There are parts in this book that are spectacularly written, fast, breathtaking pace! Then are are some smaller parts where it picks up convenient facts to help along the story. There are incidents that shouldn’t have logically happened but here they do and the good guys survive by the skin of their teeth. But, essentially, we readers, won’t have it otherwise. Overall, this one brings closure to the biggest outstanding issue in the series and one only hopes that there are more in the series to come. The story flows quite fluently and action comes thick and fast. Enough said, pick up a copy and start reading!
*I hope you have enjoyed reading this book review as much as I have enjoyed writing this! Do watch this space for more such reviews and navigate through the links below for more… Thank you!! *
