Alex Ford once had a job that most of us would consider interesting, but he found boring - he was a member of the U S Secret Service's Presidential Protection detail. Like being a pilot, it was hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. Now within a few years of retirement (i.e., forty-one), Alex has other duties, and his current task is investigation of the apparent suicide of a Treasury agent seconded to the newly-created National Intelligence Center (NIC). Strange: a "friend" of Alex's - a member of The Camel Club, a tiny group of conspiracy theorists - just happened to see this same man being murdered in a staged suicide.
All this makes no difference, though, because someone with a lot more stroke than Alex makes certain Ford is pulled off the case and stuck back on the protection detail. Which is a shame, because if Ford were allowed to investigate, he just might uncover a fiendish plot to... well, let's just say that it's quite fiendish, though this plot has several levels of fiendishness as well as the potential for more double-crosses than a shootout at the I'm-OK-You're-Not-OK Corral, not to mention a few political preachments.
Alex's friend is one Oliver Stone - not his real name - who just happens to have a pretty dark background, one in which he leaned how to kill people and hide afterward, one in which he just happened to make the acquaintance of the newly-anointed "intelligence czar" who heads up the NIC. Alex also has recently fallen in lust with a Kate Adams, a lawyer at Justice (who's also a bartender, pianist, and gymnast - who says lawyers don't have time for an outside life?). And it just so happens that Kate has been working with an NIC lieutenant to buy an old CIA facility, where "Oliver" just happened to have trained.
And a whole bunch of Middle Eastern types just happened to have died lately, though for some reason, none of their faces were recognizable... see where David Baldacci is going with this? Me neither.
For The Camel Club, David Baldacci returns to the same well - the Secret Service and presidential protection detail - that he tapped for Split Second. That volume's protagonist was Sean King, disgraced Service agent; this time out it's Alex Ford (note the protagonist's pair of four-letter names again), a Secret Service agent on the brink of disgrace. This time around, however, Baldacci appears to have been watching reruns of "The West Wing," because he seems to know at least something about how a protection detail works: I'll give him that much.
More to the point, he's come up with a fairly original idea for his book. Not only does the action hold the reader's interest with a couple of hairpin turns, it also contains a couple of surprisingly original concepts. Baldacci also manages to play to the public's susceptibilities in this post-9-11 age by using "the usual suspects" to carry out the plot. He also touches on some surprisingly current topics - limitations on the power of the intelligence community, plus rendition and torture of "the enemy."
On the other hand, where the characters of Split Second ranged from wooden to cardboard, the characters of The Camel Club range from... well, they range from cardboard to wooden. They also have an embarrassing propensity for disappearance: characters upon whose every word Baldacci hung a paragraph in one chapter go absent for chapters at a time. And with a couple of notable exceptions, the characters are as stereotypical as the characters in a Looney Tunes episode. The conventions of the genre are met, as usual: you got your near-indestructible spook, your power-hungry politico, your brilliant and beauteous lawyer... Besides characters disappearing, more than one plot thread simply truncates at the close of a chapter and then is seen no more.
Besides wasting his plot on hackneyed characters, Baldacci also frittered away most of my interest with a series of visits from the Coincidence Fairy, she whose magic wand is necessary to sprinkle amazing coincidences about the scenery. The most egregious violation of the law of averages has Oliver Stone reconnecting with the daughter he'd thought was dead (that's not a spoiler - as soon as Baldacci mentioned the scar on her hand, we knew it would appear later in the book), although Alex and Kate's accidental discovery of the rowboat is also pretty amazing. What is unfortunate is that while reading I could see ways in which Baldacci could have avoided the use of unlikely coincidences, which would have gone a long way toward making this a better book.
Baldacci gets a grudging two and a half stars: he might have had four or even five on the basis of his plot had he not depended on unnecessary coincidences. He lost stars for that sin, and lost still more ground with his stable of hackneyed characters.