Pacing. When a writer does it well, you may not even notice. But when something it wrong with the pacing, you can tell. Either the story drags by or it sprints by so fast you might have to re-read passages to figure out what the hell just happened.
In the case of The Messenger, I felt a little of both. The novel started out at a good pace, with the plot just humming along. But around the middle, I felt like I was starting to get bogged down as the characters set up and executed their operation. As I got further and further into the book, I kept waiting for things to start to pick up like they usually do in thrillers. And, as usually happens with a book that takes too long to set up, the ending felt like Silva rushed it to make all the loose ends come together. Good book, but I couldn’t help but wonder why Silva would take such care to set up the main plot and then have the ending feel like an “Oh-shit-I-have-to-get-this-to-my-editor-tomorrow-where-did-all-that-time-go” ending.
Overall, this was a really good book that could have been better if the pace had been more even and the ending drawn out a little more.