Saturday, May 17, 2008 12:16 PM
Blawg Book Highlighter #30: The Whole Truth
David Baldacci would be on most any short list of best-selling lawyer-writers. Right up next to Scott Turow, Lisa Scottoline, John Grisham and Phillip Margolin.
His latest, The Whole Truth, debuted at No. 1 in the New York Times Best Sellers List and currently stands at No. 2.
Although Baldacci was a lawyer before he was a best-selling author, he’s not best known for writing legal thrillers in the vein of Turow or Grisham. Rather, he’s primarily known for his political thrillers centered around Washington, D.C., near where he practiced law for nine years.
In The Whole Truth, Baldacci expands his fictional world into the realm of a global conspiracy thriller about war and truth – or the perception of truth – that has obvious parallels to current times and politics.
The book’s antagonist, Nicolas Creel, heads up the world’s largest defense contractor, The Ares Corporation.
“Dick, I need a war,” Creel says to Dick Pender, the man he retains to “perception manage” his company to even more riches by manipulating international conflicts.
From there on, it is a classic Robert Ludlum-style race to save the world with only one man who goes only by the name Shaw able to do it.
Reviews of the book have been mixed. While his hometown Richmond Times-Dispatch calls it “wickedly brilliant” and declares Baldacci to be in contention for “Thinking Man’s Thriller Writer,” others have not been so enthusiastic. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave Baldacci points for highlighting the dangers of perception management and how easily campaigns of mistruth can spread in the age of the Internet, but found the plot to be “wildly improbable” and some of the writing “banal.”
Visit Baldacci’s website to read an excerpt from the book, download a copy of the promotional bookmark, or to listen to a promotional interview with the author. http://www.davidbaldacci.com/web/content/view/208/1/
Baldacci is also doing an “online book signing” for until May 23, 2008. http://www.davidbaldacci.com/web/content/view/121/1/
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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