Book Review: Daylight

Synopsis:

“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a tiger by its toe.” That children’s rhyme is seared into FBI Agent Atlee Pine’s memory. It’s what the kidnapper recited as he chose between six-year-old Atlee and her twin sister, Mercy. Since that night, Atlee has been tormented by uncertainty because Mercy was abducted and never seen again. The case was never solved.

In Long Road to Mercy, bestselling author David Baldacci introduced readers to Atlee and her search for Mercy. In the second installment of her story, A Midnight to Midnight, Atlee returned to her Georgia hometown to investigate.

In Daylight, the third volume of the series, Atlee’s search for Mercy causes her to clash with a military investigator’s high-stakes case and leads both into a global conspiracy from which neither of them will escape unscathed.

Just as Atlee is pressured to end her investigation into Mercy’s disappearance, she finally gets her most promising breakthrough yet. She believes she has uncovered the identity of her sister’s kidnapper: Ito Vincenzo.

With time running out, Atlee and her trusted assistant, Carol Blum, race to Vincenzo’s last known location in Trenton, New Jersey. They unwittingly stumble right into John Puller’s case, blowing his arrest of a suspect during a drug ring investigation involving a military installation.

Stunningly, Pine and Puller’s ensuing joint investigation uncovers a connection between Vincenzo’s family and a breathtaking scheme that strikes at the very heart of global democracy. Peeling back the layers of deceit, lies and cover-ups, Atlee finally learns the truth about what happened to Mercy.

And that truth shocks Atlee to her very core.

Review:

Author David Baldacci has sold more than 150 million copies of his more than forty novels since 1996. He says, “I think I enjoy it. I never treat it as a job. I’ve always kept that seven-year-old childlike wonder. . . . I make a living by making stuff up. I don’t have a boss. I make my own hours. How lucky am I?” When asked to provide advice to budding writers, tells them, “If you don’t have fun while you’re doing it, it’s going to come through in the pages, and it’s going to be a drudge. Your prose is not going to be as good. Your plots are not going to be as good, your characters are not going to be as scintillating, and you’re probably not going to have a long career. You’ve got to have some fun while you’re doing this,” even though writing requires hard work and dedication. Baldacci’s Atlee Pine series is a sterling example of an author having a great deal of fun creating stories, even when addressing serious topics.

The third installment in Atlee Pine’s journey to discover what happened to and the whereabouts of her twin sister so many years ago takes her and Carol to Fort Dix, a huge military installation in New Jersey. There she encounters John Puller, a military CID agent with the U.S. Army. Puller’s appearance was briefly foreshadowed in A Minute to Midnight when Atlee mentioned that they worked on an investigation together years ago and he served as a mentor to her. Baldacci fans will be happy about the full-fledged reappearance of his protagonist from another four-book series: Zero Day, The Forgotten, The Escape, and No Man’s Land.

Puller is investigating a drug ring operating out of Fort Dix. Atlee wants to speak to the man at the center of the drug ring because he may be the grandson of Mercy’s kidnapper. He’s the only living relative of Ito VIncenzo. He lives in the family home, which turns out to hold information about Mercy’s disappearance, and works in the motor pool at Fort Dix. At the outset, Atlee does not suspect that he might be a criminal. She discovers that her mother played a key role in Ito’s brother being convicted and sent to prison. Atlee has to piece together how Ito managed to find her family when they were supposed to be safely tucked away in a witness protection program.

Atlee and Puller decide to team up, but their collaboration is not effortless. They are an unlikely pair, adhering to and operating by different rules, procedures, and their superiors’ expectations. Puller operates within the context of Army regulations — guidelines applicable to civilians are irrelevant to him. But Atlee is a trained FBI agent bound by Constitutional principles and protections such as due process that have no meaning in the military universe. And Atlee’s career is very much in jeopardy. The events of so many years ago have wreaked havoc in her personal and professional lives, and the FBI has given her a brief window of time in which to wrap up her investigation and get back to work. Or not return to duty at all. But as she explains to Carol, she just can’t let go of either the search for her sister or the investigation she has gotten caught up in. “The only reason I’m an FBI agent is because I want to see people who destroy other people’s lives brought to justice and pay for what they did. The want the families of their victims to have closure.” In other words, she wants the families of other victims to have the one thing that has always eluded her.

Readers might be surprised to learn that Atlee is the first female lead character Baldacci has created and featured in a series. She is believable and empathetic, and readers have taken her into their hearts. She is a large and physically imposing woman with a physique enhanced by her commitment to fitness, particularly weightlifting. That was a deliberate choice by Baldacci, given that Atlee is in a profession that remains dominated by men. Her physicality is an asset to her career. First, Baldacci acknowledges that as an FBI agent — male or female — “if you can’t cut it physically, you will not succeed.” And Atlee is driven to succeed. Second, she commands respect from her male counterparts who recognize that, at least from a physical perspective, she is their equal. Atlee has worked hard to get where she is, and makes no apology for being a woman in a traditionally male job. Baldacci has given her a “get out of my way because I’m here so deal with it” attitude.

Baldacci explains that he was raised and has spent his life surrounded by “strong, independent women” who have impacted his outlook. Among them, he lists his mother, sister (a journalist), wife, and daughter. When crafting Atlee’s attributes, he wasn’t interested in creating a caricature and was cognizant of the fact that women in male-dominated professions “have to work three times as hard to get to the same level.” So he “understood the ambition, drive, and desire” with which he imbued Atlee. He made Atlee a “bad-ass” who “is not going to make any apologies. No exceptions. No excuses.” He knew she “wasn’t going to go in[to her search for the truth or her career] timid.” Atless doesn’t always play by the rules, is confident, and “unapologetically herself.”

Which is not to save that she isn’t vulnerable. Because she is. She suffered a traumatic event as a child — Mercy’s kidnapping and sustaining serious injury herself — that motivated her to join the FBI. She is without family, having lost her parents, as well as Mercy. And she makes mistakes. Sometimes she develops tunnel vision in her determination to find answers, and she makes reckless choices, but she is a sympathetic character. “The character-building part is whether we learn from mistakes or keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again,” Baldacci says. And he sees her vulnerability as “all about being human. That’s not about being a man or a woman.” Rather, it’s one of the things that makes characters interesting because it equates with strength.

Baldacci found that pairing Atlee with John Puller made sense. Both characters are sometimes fragile as a result of tragic familial relationships. While Atlee lost her family, Puller has never felt that he could live up to his father’s example. He feels that his father will always outrank him, even though Puller is a combat veteran who was wounded.

Daylight opens with Atlee following a significant clue about what happened to Mercy. In A Minute to Midnight, she learned about her parents’ pasts. Now she uncovers what might have served as motivation for Mercy’s abduction in a complex turn of events that brings more new characters into the mix. As in the earlier volumes, Atlee gets a bit sidetracked by Puller’s investigation into the drug ring, but inadvertently discovers potential links between the two cases. But Atlee and Puller are stonewalled repeatedly by powerful and corrupt government officials, including those running the prison system, as well as well-connected criminals.

The title of the book is significant. Baldacci picked Daylight because he moves Atlee out of the dark unknown and further into the light of truth. “Things become clear to her,” he notes, as she inches closer to finding out what happened to Mercy. Many additional details about the case are uncovered in this installment, forcing Atlee to deal with learning that virtually nothing she believed growing up was actually true.

Baldacci promises that in the final installment, aptly titled, simply, Mercy, and scheduled to be released on November 16, 2021, the fate of Atlee’s beloved sister will finally be revealed, her complete story told.