The Edge by David Baldacci

 

Published by Grand Central Publishing on November 14, 2023

Small town secrets are at the heart of David Baldacci’s latest Travis Devine thriller. I occasionally roll my eyes at all the tough guy trappings in tough guy thrillers, but I give Baldacci credit for telling a plausible and reasonably exciting story that incorporates thrills without the superhuman stunts that mar so many entries in the tough guy subgenre.

Jenny Silkwell was a CIA agent who recently earned high level access to the CIA’s resources. She returned to her hometown in Maine after explaining to her mother that she needed to take care of “unfinished business.” Her trip ended when she was shot in the head. Her body apparently tumbled over a cliff and landed on the rocky shore. An aging widower with mobility problems told the police that he spotted the body while walking in the rain. The police managed to retrieve it before it was washed out to sea.

The reader quickly learns that Jenny’s sister Alex was assaulted fifteen years earlier. Perhaps Jenny’s unfinished business relates to that assault. Alex suffers from situational amnesia that prevents her from identifying her assailant, although she replays the assault in her dreams. Blocking such critical information for fifteen years (even though the attacker’s name is just on the tip of her tongue) is improbable but convenient to the plot. I suppose every thriller is entitled to have one element that strains credibility.

Jenny’s father is hospitalized. He was a military officer turned senator whose friends include Travis Devine’s boss. Devine works for one of those off-the-books clandestine agencies that thriller writers are always inventing. His boss tasks him with investigating Jenny’s death. Devine immediately determines that (1) the story told by the guy who happened upon the body doesn’t make sense, and (2) the police theory about how Jenny was shot isn’t consistent with the trajectory of the bullet that killed her. That the police didn’t take note of these facts means (1) they are incompetent small town cops or (2) they would prefer that the truth not be revealed or (3) both.

Given her job, Jenny might have been killed by foreign adversaries. Devine begins the novel by killing a foreign hit team (apart from a young woman who escapes) and encounters more foreign assassins as the story unfolds, but he suspects that Jenny was killed by locals because of the “unfinished business” she was trying to resolve.

The story follows Devine as he questions nearly everyone in town, many of whom might have something to do with Alex’s assault and/or Jenny’s death and/or a coverup of one or both of those events. Notable characters (who might also be suspects) include the widower who found Jenny’s body, his plucky granddaughter (whose parents died in a mysterious fire), Jenny’s business-minded brother, a couple of local (and one not-so-local) cops, and members of a family that operates the local funeral home, including the town doctor/coroner. More deaths ensue as Devine onducts his investigation.

As is typical of thrillers in this subgenre, Devine does a lot of tough-guysplaining about guns and ammunition and military training. He also explains how to break yourself free from duct tape and zip ties and the best ways to disable an opponent (going for the throat has been a go-to move for a few years now). All of this has been covered in so many tough guy novels that it would be better for characters just to execute their moves rather than wasting words explaining why they’re doing it, but that might shortchange readers who get excited when they read about guns and fighting. Still, most readers don’t need a textbook that covers the basics of being a tough guy. I was more interested in a lobsterman who lobstermansplained the negative impact that global warming is having on lobsters.

Baldacci boosts the word count by recounting Devine’s memories of West Point (where outstanding men learned to do their very best) and his days helping CID investigate crimes (where most of the rape accusations against soldiers proved to be false because warriors are honorable men). Devine’s military boosterism probably plays well with much of the audience for tough guy thrillers, but it becomes a bit wearing, given its disconnect from the real world.

An artistic character opines that most men are sad because they can’t live up to society’s expectations of man as Rambo. That opinion fits nicely within the subgenre’s theme that tough guys are superior to everyone else and puny little girly men all wish they were tough guys.

The story is complex without becoming confusing, although the reader might be challenged to keep track of characters and their relationship to each other. Fortunately, one of the bad guys lives long enough after being shot at the end of the story to give a long-winded confession that explains all the details Devine hadn’t yet deduced. Thank the gods for long-winded confessions that villains love to make at the end of thrillers. Readers would be so confused if they didn’t save the day.

Setting aside my reservations about Baldacci's tough guy and military tropes, I recommend The Edge to thriller fans. Baldacci maintains a good pace, sets up a couple of interesting mysteries, and delivers the action that thrillers require.

RECOMMENDED

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

The 6:20 Man by David Baldacci

Published by ‎ Grand Central Publishing on July 12, 2022

Travis Devine, former Army Ranger (because what thriller hero isn’t?), works in an entry-level finance job for the investment firm Cowl & Comely. Brad Cowl got a journalist fired for questioning his origin story. He claims to have built himself up from scratch after his parents squandered the family wealth, but he’s the squanderer. Yet he came into a boatload of money and became a Wall Street power player overnight. How did that happen?

Devine isn’t allowed on the 51st floor. Devine has little curiosity about the floor until Sara Ewes, a co-worker he once shagged (in violation of company shagging rules), is found dead in a company closet, having apparently hung herself. Of course, she was murdered. And of course, Devine is a suspect, in part because he stupidly evades disclosing his one-night stand with Sara. Nor does he tell the police about the mysterious, untraceable emails he receives that were sent by someone who had intimate knowledge of the crime. Why does Devine make these poor decisions? Only because the plot requires him to be kinda stupid.

In the time-honored tradition of thriller heroes, Devine decides to clear his name by finding the real killer. Not that he has much choice in the matter. A retired General recruits Devine to investigate his employer, assuring Devine’s compliance by threatening to expose a bad deed that he committed while he was still in the Army.

Devine’s investigation takes him to Sara’s parents (intolerant Christian missionaries from whom Sara was estranged); to co-worker Jenn Stamos, who seems particularly devastated by Sara’s death; and to Cowl’s live-in lover, Michelle, whose bikini-clad body he admires every morning when the 6:20 train passes Cowl’s swimming pool.

Devine lives outside of New York City in an apartment with three roommates. One is a Russian hacker. One is an entrepreneur who has started a dating site. One is a recent law school graduate. The reader will intuit that at least one of the roommates is not what he or she appears to be.

Much of the story — particularly a bizarre scheme to send messages with bikinis — is farfetched, but such is the way of the modern thriller. Still, some plot elements are clever and the story holds together. David Baldacci keeps surprises well hidden and plants enough false clues to prompt guesses whether characters are good guys or bad guys.

There is little depth to the characters, but tough guy protagonists aren’t known for their depth. Devine’s guilt about his military misconduct doesn’t suffice to make him interesting. Devine’s ability to outfight three attackers (he does that multiple times) substitutes for his absent personality, as is typical of tough guy thrillers. Yet gratuitous displays of toughness never dominate the plot. I consider that a plus; fans of gratuitous violence might disagree.

The story seems to set up Devine as the lead character in a new series, as if Baldacci isn’t juggling enough series protagonists without adding another tough guy to the mix. I recommend The 6:20 Man for the interesting story it tells, not because Devine stands out in the crowded world of thriller tough guy protagonists.

RECOMMENDED

Dream Town by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 19, 2022

Dream Town is the third novel to feature David Baldacci's private investigator from the past, Aloysius Archer. The novel takes place in 1952-53 and is set in Los Angeles, a prime location of American noir in the last decade of noir’s golden age. Compared to crime writers of the 1950s, Baldacci is more David Goodis than Jim Thompson. Like Goodis’ protagonists, Archer isn’t particularly hard-boiled, but Baldacci is similar to Thompson in capturing the corrupt atmosphere that contaminates glitter and shatters dreams of the City of Angels.

The novel’s gritty plot involves human and drug trafficking. Mix in blackmail, murder, and kinky sex in a soulless city and you’ve got the elements of a noir novel. The characters are largely connected to the movie industry, organized crime, or both.

Archer brings a twenty-first century attitude about women to the 1950s as he condemns a culture that requires women to sleep their way to success but won’t allow successful women to sign mortgages without a male co-signer. Well, good for Archer, but I’m not convinced a male PI in 1953 would have shared Thompson’s vision of a better world. I was more convinced by the female characters who understand the unfairness of a patriarchal industry (and society) but are determined to succeed — in some cases, by adopting the corrupt tactics of the men who control the system.

Archer works with his mentor, Willie Dash, in the Bay Area. He’s in LA to see Liberty Callahan, with whom he has (or had) a thing. They’re having dinner when Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter and friend of Liberty’s, turns up and tells Liberty of her fear that someone is trying to kill her. When Liberty explains that Archer is a private investigator, Lamb hires Archer to track down the source of her fear. Lamb promptly disappears, leaving Archer with a missing person investigation.

Archer’s investigation begins in Lamb’s house, where a man has answered the phone without identifying himself. Archer trips over a dead body in the house and, in the tradition of private eye novels in every era, is hit on the head and left in the house with the body.

Baldacci creates a seedy atmosphere with a mob-controlled establishment in Chinatown that takes advantage of desperate immigrants and blackmail victims to serve the unorthodox sexual interests of powerful men. Following clues to Lamb’s disappearance, Archer encounters violence in Chinatown, and on a beach where he stumbles across smugglers, and in Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and basically everywhere he goes. Archer is a violence magnet, an essential feature of a noir protagonist. Shootouts, fistfights, and car chases ensue.

The novel resolves, at least temporarily, Archer’s uncertain relationship with Liberty. It also portends a change in Archer’s career. He likes the Bay Area, but there’s more work available in LA and there’s something appealing about searching for reality in a city that is based on illusion.

The plot is intricate but, unlike a Chandler novel, it makes sense. Readers might want to make notes to keep track of all the relationships between the characters, and perhaps use pens of different colors to make clear that relationships change as the story evolves. The intricacy will keep the reader on his or her toes, making it a challenge to guess Lamb’s fate and the roles of the various characters who may or may not have been involved in her disappearance. If the ending is not entirely unexpected, that’s only because many possible endings are consistent with the plot. The one Baldacci chose is as good as any. Readers who enjoy 1950s noir and don’t want to revisit the originals should be entertained by Baldacci’s attempt to recapture the past.

RECOMMENDED

Memory Man by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 21, 2015

Amos Decker comes home to find that his mother, wife, and son have been murdered. Decker is a cop and the beginning of his story is too familiar to be promising. He also sees numbers and colors in ways that have become too familiar among fictional characters who suffer from brain abnormalities. As if that's not enough, Decker has the memory (and empathy) of a supercomputer.

When writers decide to use a prop to make a character interesting, they usually pick one. Baldacci's decision to use four (numbers, colors, memory, and loss of family to a killer) gives Amos an overdone quality that permeates the novel. Yes, it's fun to give a character some quirky traits, but Decker is quirkiness on steroids. The numbers and colors and DVD-like memory all come across as gimmicks, not as humanizing traits. Primarily because I disliked the gimmicks upon which the central character is founded, I don't regard Memory Man as one of David Baldacci's better efforts. All of the autistic-savant stuff is just too trite. And really, the fact that he's chased by menacing 3s is just silly.

The bad guys in Memory Man might as well be supervillains -- the unpowered kind, like Lex Luthor or the Joker -- given their astonishing ability to foresee Decker's every act and to greet his appearances by leaving threatening scrawls on walls for him to read. Other things I didn't believe: Why is the top cop inviting a reporter to tag along with Decker on a police investigation? Why does the FBI agree to let her fly on its government jet? Why, when time is of the essence, do Decker and the reporter drive from Burlington to Chicago when they could fly there in a couple of hours? I'll go pretty far to suspend disbelief when I read a thriller, but I just couldn't buy much of anything in this one.

The plot of Memory Man is almost as silly as the Memory Man character. Fifteen months after the killings, Decker is a private investigator. The person who killed his family remains at large. After a school shooting, the Burlington Police improbably hire Decker as a consultant (the entire police force plus the FBI not being enough), giving Baldacci a chance to prove that Memory Man is a supercop, sort of a linebacker version of Sherlock Holmes, or at least he would be if he were still a cop. Naturally, although I won't discuss how, the mystery of the school shooting (who did it, why, and how did the shooter escape undetected) quickly ties in to the murders of Decker's wife and children.

I enjoyed following Decker as he investigated the school shooting. Baldacci is a seasoned writer who knows how to move a story at a good pace. Dialog is authentic and the quality of Baldacci's prose is never a problem. It is always easy to read Baldacci to the end, but this is the first Baldacci novel I've read that I would not recommend, even with reservations. The killer's motivation (as least with regard to Decker and particularly Decker's family) struck me as preposterous. The last chapters are predictable. Since I didn't buy either the plot or the reality of the central characters, all that remains is snappy prose, and that doesn't overcome the silliness.

NOT RECOMMENDED