And deliver us from... Baldacci

Deliver Us from Evil by David Baldacci
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The book is based on well designed scenario.
Start with a commonly known event. In this case it is Holocaust. Follow with a widely unknown historical event. In this case it is Holodomor - a Soviet designed famine in Ukraine. The aim of such a mixture is to make impression, firstly that the author sticks to historical events, secondly that there were terrible crimes committed in obscure places and circumstances which we never will be able to fully comprehend.
On such prepared ground we can plant a story of another, not-so-authentic, genocide, this time organised by post-soviet KGB (of source there is a mention, that the current leader of Russia has KGB past).
The book is about a hunt for a perpetrator of this crime.
The second arm of the story is detailed description of cruelty. Once I read an interesting observation. The author looked on the bookshelf in the library. He noticed that in one of the books there was a small section apparently read more frequently as the pages were more worn out. He looked there - these were descriptions of tortures.
It seems the observations were right, some readers are excited reading about cruelties. My impression is, that this topic was one of driving powers of Stieg Larsson's Millenium series.
Writing about cruelties has an additional strength. The reader feels a strong desire to punish the perpetrators. It opens a field for a further fantasies about cruelty - this time for a good cause.
I understand, that 'And deliver us from Evil' is a part of a series of books. It is about some mysterious organisation(s) whose aim is to punish mass murderer's. They collect enormous material on crimes committed, but do not pass it to any justice system rightly considering them as not efficient enough . So they will bring the devil to justice themselves. It seems that there are numerous occasions to kill the the beast, but a special scenario must be observed. The perpetrator must be presented a documentation of atrocities committed and then executed. It is not easy and here we have substance to fill 400+ pages of the book. This way to justice leads to few dozens of accidental casualties.
I managed to read almost 300 pages of this book and I have to admit there were written well. I mean the plot, language, characters presentation, description of localities. In this book there were not so many graphic descriptions of cruelties so only a dozen or two pages to skip.
The author describes frequently technologically advanced methods and equipment. In my opinion does it very well... with one exception. Hunted criminals are protected by very advanced security systems, still in 2 cases just a few seconds power failure creates opportunity to break them. Well, for $80 I bought a very simple home security system and guess what? It is not affected by a power failure.

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