True Blue

David Baldacci quickly became one of my favorite authors. I'm not the biggest fan of his Camel Club series but all of his novels are typically good reads. He definitely took a step backwards with this one. It's not a bad story but you have to suspend all sense of reality to enjoy it. You have to believe that a police chief would invite her disgraced ex-con, ex-cop sister to a crime scene investigation. You have to believe that an ex-cop and a corporate lawyer with no investigative experience can out maneuver the police. And you have to believe that the just out of prison ex-cop would willingly break the law - while on parole - in the belief that an ex-cop just out of prison could get her job back through such tactics. This plot is more suited for a short-lived TV series than for a Baldacci book. That being said it's not badly written but also definitely not worthy of the praise that Baldacci fans will give it just because it's a Baldacci book. This is the juncture where Baldacci can buckle down and bring back riveting stories or he can go the way of other massively successful authors (Grisham and Patterson are good examples) who realize anything they write, regardless of quality, will be an instant best-seller and they seem to put in the effort lately to prove that point.

I've never felt inclined to write a review before but this book was so bad that I had to. The plot is bad, the characters are poorly written and the ending is unbelievably bad. Too many situations make you almost laugh out loud at how ridiculous they are. The tough gang leader Psycho deciding to play one on one basketball to decide the heroes fates. The Russian assassin who rather than simply finishing her job and killing them decides it would be more interesting to have a knife fight with Mace. The police chief is a joke, not to mention the entire police department.

However the worst part is the dialogue. It is unbelievably bad, you cannot believe real people would talk like this at all. Baldacci learned some new lingo and is so proud of it that he bashes you over the head with it. I get it, police in D.C. are called "blues" and bad guys are "bandits" that doesn't meant that every single character must nonstop say blues and bandits. That annoyed me even more than the unbelievable plot.

In David Baldacci's thriller "True Blue," former cop Mace Perry teams up with lawyer Roy Kingman to solve a captivating double murder involving Diane Tolliver, Roy's colleague at a private law firm and Jamie Malden, a powerful U.S. attorney known for previously defending mobsters. The action is set in the dark underworld of Washington D.C., full of criminals and politicians holding their own sets of agendas with danger lurking at every corner in the streets.

Mace Perry has just gotten out of jail after serving two years for a crime she never committed and being stripped of her police credentials in the process. She accepts a lucrative offer to serve as wealthy Professor Altman's research assistant, but will do anything to be given a chance to become a cop again--even risk her own life to solve the case that has formally been assigned to her sister, police Chief Beth Perry.

In the meantime, Roy Kingman, who worked closely with the murdered Tolliver, decides to help Mace with the investigation--risking losing his own job. As Perry and Kingman try to discover what really happened and attempt to follow clues left behind by Diane, such as an odd e-mail sent to Roy and a key mysteriously hidden in an old law manual, they become hot targets for the killers and come face-to-face with an impostor posing as Diane's escort. Circumstances get further complicated, when a homeless vet is detained as the lead suspect in the murder but Kingman, confident in his innocence and suspecting the evidence was planted, decides to act as his defense lawyer in court despite a new clue confirming his guilt and Kingman on the verge of being fired.

This is the first Baldacci book I read, but was left impressed by the plot. The action throughout this book is non-stopping and leaves the reader constantly on the edge. There were a lot of unpredictable turns in the plot, such as when the police are told they're not authorized to investigate Malden's murder despite his high status as a prosecutor, and several plot sequences happening behind-the-scenes where Baldacci actually shows the bad guys spying and planning to kill Mace with Roy, which eventually help piece together the mystery. Baldacci also questions whether, in some cases, the doings of criminals or politicians are above the law. Overall, this was a quick and riveting read.

What a disappointment! I felt as though I'd been dropped into book three of a Mace Perry series and missed the first two. Poor character development, mundane dialog, reality suspension needed. I'll stick to the Camel Club books.

As a fan of David Baldacci, I was terribly disappointed in his latest work. The characters are unbelievable and the plot even more so. And then what seemed to be a main plot line (who framed Mace Perry) is never resolved. Frankly, I think Baldacci should should slow down the pace of his publishing.