Simply Lies by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 18, 2023

Mickey Gibson is a mommy. Her father is a retired cop. Now she tracks assets on a computer for a private investigation firm. Her father is protective and scolds her when she takes risks because that’s how the formula for this kind of story works. And that’s about all you need to know about Gibson. It’s also about everything you’ll learn about Gibson from reading Simply Lies. She’s a stock character and David Baldacci makes no effort to add anything of interest to her off-the-shelf personality.

Gibson gets a call from someone at her firm who has never contacted her before. She’s instructed to travel to a house in a nearby Virginia city and inventory its contents, which are about to be seized by their client to satisfy debts. She’s told where to find a hidden key. When she uses the key to enter the home, Gibson finds a dead body.

The victim is Daniel Pottinger, an alias assigned to a mob accountant who was in witness protection until he disappeared. His wife also disappeared, perhaps because Pottinger killed her. His son and daughter, neither of whom had good thoughts about Pottinger, left witness protection when they turned eighteen and haven’t been seen since. Pottinger purchased the house where his body was found for five million, suggesting that he stole money from the mob and stashed it before entering witness protection. He may have been involved in other criminal enterprises.

Gibson calls the police. The lead detective soon learns that Gibson’s firm didn’t send her to the house. Gibson briefly becomes a murder suspect and is gets suspended from her job, giving her a motivation to find the person who dispatched her to find Pottinger’s body. That person is known to the reader as Clarisse. Her true identity is hidden from Gibson and the reader, but the reader knows that Clarisse had a connection with Gibson at some point in their intersecting lives. When they were both younger, Clarisse was jealous of Gibson for all the usual reasons.

Baldacci peppers in scenes of Gibson taking her kids to the park and dealing with their vomit to establish her credentials as a supermom. The scenes come across as set dressing. Given how often she hands the kids off to babysitters or her parents so she can do her detective work, parenting is at best her part-time job. It certainly isn’t the chore she makes it out to be. The window dressing is apparently a substitute for a personality that Gibson otherwise lacks.

Baldacci makes a point of telling us how much Gibson loves her kids and dad, so the formula requires her entire family to be threatened before the novel ends. That happens after two-thirds of the story has been told, the point in the formula at which tension should begin to mount.

Gibson is too good to be interesting. The evildoers are too evil — in multiple and thoroughly disgusting ways — to be interesting villains. The plot has credibility problems, but predictability is its larger failing. The unsurprising resolution of the central mystery — who is Clarisse? — is a bit of a yawner. I found myself not caring about the related mystery — why did Clarisse drag Gibson into the death of Pottinger?

The plot is muddied with bitcoin and NFTs and other contrivances to distract the reader from the story’s formulaic nature. A subplot involving a character who turns out to have an assumed identity adds a final contrivance that broke this reader’s back. An action scene at the end comes across as padding, as does a treasure hunt that depends on a silly cipher. Baldacci knows how to keep readers entertained as he spins his plates, but in the end I was left wondering why I’d watched plates spin for more than four hundred pages.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS