Baldacci in London
Barry Forshaw

David Baldacci is lean and fit-looking, as he sips a diet Coke in a London restaurant. As well he might: he has his own gym, in which he maintains an impressive keep-fit regime along with his equally rigorous writing routine. Having left the lucrative legal profession behind, he is now (he says) much happier following a writing calling - not surprisingly, as his books regularly reach the number one slot in his native US, with British sales not far behind. He's in London for a punishing publicity trip to promote his new book, Hour Game, and is as entertaining on the idiocies of the Michael Jackson trial - the exoneration was just in - as he is on the reason so many lawyers turned to writing novels ('I blame LA Law: many people joined the profession, assuming that it would be as glossy and exhilarating as that show. When the realities of the legal life kicked in, there where suddenly a lot of bored and disappointed lawyers. They'd seen a John Grisham could get out by writing a novel, so why not them?').

Few of these would-be novelists, however, have been as successful as Baldacci. In such books as Absolute Power and Saving Faith, he carved out a reputation as an adroit and imaginative writer. With Wish You Well, he consolidated his reputation and builds in new layers of understanding in the characterisation. The Cardinal family suffers a terrible car accident in which the children (12-year-old Lou and 7-year-old Oz) survive, but their father is killed and their mother left in a coma. Despite the destruction of their lives, the children are offered hope when their great-grandmother Louisa-Mae decides to take them to live with her at her farm in Virginia. Soon, they settle into a happy rural routine until natural gas is discovered on the mountain, and their bucolic peace is shattered by local opinion condemning Louisa-Mae for refusing to sell. Soon, family is locked in a bitter courtroom battle in which their survival is at stake. As in his previous work, Baldacci is particularly good at the dynamics of conflict within a family as much as external threat, and without ever trying to manipulate the reader's emotions, he soon has us involved in a dramatic and affecting narrative that deals with issues of personal choice quite as cogently as with the large-scale emotions of the plot.

Hour Game is an innovative spin on a familiar theme. Yes, a lot of the territory here has been traversed before, but there are new wrinkles here - readers groan at the number of entries in the genre, but Hour Game freshens the brew. Baldacci's new series characters are here: the tall, athletic Michelle Maxwell and the brilliant aesthete Sean King, both ex-Secret Service personnel who were obliged to leave their jobs under a cloud. The duo encountered some pretty nasty things in that first book, but Hour Game adds new levels of gruesomeness. Maxwell and King, having inaugurated a partnership that will utilise their individual skills, look into the disappearance of some highly confidential papers owned by the well-placed Battle family. The decomposed body of a young woman is found, arranged in a bizarre position, and two teenagers are bloodily slaughtered while having sex in a car. It seems a serial killer is at work - and King and Maxwell soon learn that the Battle family is (needless to say) in things up to their necks.

Innovations include a murderer who utilises the various MO's of famous serial killers, such as the highly intelligent psychopath Ted Bundy and several other real-life monsters. And it goes without saying that the horrific narrative is dispatched with maximum effectiveness by the author.

Posted at 12:00AM Monday 01 Jan 2007