Think About It.....

"The unapparent connection is more powerful than the apparent one."
--Heraclitus, 500BC

I took the quote from the opening page of Rober Ludlum's 2006 novel titled, "The Ambler Warning".  I like the quote much better, so far, than the actual novel.  The story is interesting enough, barring the fact that the premise (government secret agents taken captive by their own governments and given mind altering chemicals, arranged escapes, international chases, spy agencies world wide trying to get their hands on the newly freed agent and his overwhelming confusion that the world and himself are not the way he remembers them to be before his captivity) have been done more than once before, by several different authors.

The problem for me with this particular story is that the "hook" designed to draw me into the story doesn't work for me.  Only a few pages into the novel we are introduced to a character sympathetic to the central character's dilemma. She is one of the people involved in his captivity and helps him to regain his composure long enough, after unknown months of isolation, to escape the government facility in which he is being held.  

There is no suspense with this woman.  It is obvious from the first page on which she appears that she is part of the plot hatched by the central character's captives to make sure he actually escapes to whatever fate will ultimately await him by the end of the book.  Less than half way through the story they reconnect elsewhere, but he still believes she is a safe haven for him, that she actually believed his stories while still in the facility and is still on his side.  The central character is known for being able to read everyone around him, to understand what they are thinking, to foresee what they are going to do, yet he is apparently completely bamboozled and taken in by this seemingly sympathetic woman who risked her entire career and possibly her own life to help him escape his captors after knowing him a few months in a professional nursing capacity only.

Unless there is a plot twist later on where we discover the central character has not actually been taken in, but has just not shared that little detail with the readers, (which would be unfair to the reader and very jarring as well), it doesn't make any sense that she is the one person in the whole screwy world of spys and counter-intelligence folk that he can't see through.

I am hoping the story becomes a bit more credible before the end.  Of course none of these types of suspense stories are completely credible and that is part of the fun, but this one has me kind of irritated because of the obvious problem with the characters.  

As I say, I am less than half way through the story and I hope I am incorrect about what seems too obvious. I hope I am the one being taken in by an author who is usually a darned good suspense novelist.