Baldacci Returns to Camel Club Story After a Shot at International Thriller

It was a sure bet that the publishing industry would not sit idly by and let the guy from England, aka Lee Child, suck all the air out of the business⎯thirty millions books sold and the number is still climbing⎯without a challenge to his Jack Reacher series.

The surprise is that one of the challenges came from David Baldacci, author of THE WHOLE TRUTH, published by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group USA.

Baldacci is best known for his fictional creation of a not-so-merry-band of social misfits, led by a guy who uses Stone as his alias, and lives in a cemetery. This group, tagged the Camel Club, skulks around Washington, D. C., fighting for truth, justice and the American Way.

Baldacci one-ups the Brit with his main character in the name game. There’s no Jack, Jake, Jim, or John for a first name. The hero’s name is Shaw. That’s a simple one, two, or three-syllable name, depending in what part of the world one learned pronunciation.

Shaw’s character development in the book follows the path of all deed and with no depth. The book has enough action and manly feats to make Sylvester Stylone jealous. This shallowness made The Old Cobbler start looking at the villain, Nicholas Creel, as the book’s main character.

Think back to the 1960s when the outrageous villain in each movie helped to make James Bond flicks the Pièce de résistance of the cinema world. Then throw in a couple of villains from Batman. That’ll get you close to Baldacci’s Nicholas Creel, a character that redefines “over the top.”

Creel lives large, like all good villains do. He seems to own one each of what the world has to offer, but his favorite toy is his yacht, or ship, or whatever one calls a non-military vessel that is a hundred feet longer than a football field.

The best way to describe the vessel is to think a floating Playboy Mansion, maybe two of them combined. It comes with an array of accouterments, including a submarine. The biggest problem Creel seems to have on the boat is getting his young wife to keep her clothes on while she strolls about the vessel. She has this hang-up about tan lines.

Creel finances his needs of greed and lust through the Ares Corporation, a military weapons producer. Anything that shoots, explodes, or otherwise folds, spindles, or mutilates people, places and things can be had from Ares.

This villain does have a good side. He donates hundreds of millions for the building of hospitals and orphanages. He’s found that the excavations for these buildings’ foundations make great places to bury the bodies of those who got in his way.

But the world presents a big problem for Creel. The Iron Curtain is gone. The bear and eagle have become drinking buddies. This loss of one-upmanship in the armaments race has reduced his market to the back-yard squabbles in the Middle East. So, he turns to a PM firm.

A PM (perception management) firm is different from a public relations firm in that it does not have to base its lies on an actual person, place or thing. Success rests on the fact that the lies are strictly the figments of a warped mind without reality showing up, bearing truth.

The lie created to revive sales, and spread around the world via the Internet, makes both China and Russia believe the other is preparing for a military invasion. Both react as predicted. They call the Ares Corporation and start placing rush orders.

This is the tangled web that our man Shaw must fight through. He must first figure out that Creel and his PM firm are behind the new arms race. He then single-handedly, with a bit of help from local authorities, saves humanity by eliminating Creel.

Shaw works for a mysterious agency that remains a shadowy presence. Think Maxwell Smart, agent 86, and CONTROL, to get the idea. Shaw answers to a single person, as Smart did to “Chief,” and James Bond did to “M.”

At the beginning of the book, Shaw is in love. He evens proposes. But there seems to be some unwritten rule in books of this genre. Women who are beautiful, highly intelligent, and well educated must die in an early chapter. An alcoholic, out-of-work journalist becomes Shaw’s female foil for the rest of the story.

THE WHOLE TRUTH, published in April 2008, seems to be a single shot by the author to earn a spot at the final table the international thriller tournament.
The book is wedged between Baldacci’s last two Camel Club stories.

STONE COLD hit the market in November 2007. His latest offering, DEVINE TRUTH, was released a week or so ago, on November 4. While this latest book returns to the Camel Club, the fourth one in this series, it raises an interesting question, but that is a story for another time.

In THE KILLER'S WIFE, a Debut Novel, Bill Floyd Tackles Difficult Premise

Should a beginning author’s debut novel be reviewed with the same critical eye as would be used to view the work of a long-established author? Would an author who has been practicing his craft for dozens of years say his first one is as good as his latest?

The Old Cobbler asks this question after reading THE KILLER’S WIFE, a book written by Bill Floyd, a young man from Morrisville, North Carolina.

Before Floyd’s novel appeared, it seemed safe to assume that any story, true crime or fiction, could only be another footnote to Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD, published in 1966.

First, it’s the title of Floyd’s book that grabs your attention. Then less than two pages into a rather benign scene between two strangers meeting in a supermarket, readers are told:

“My name is Charles Pritchett. Your real name is Nina Mosley… your husband … killed my daughter, Carrie.” This is the beginning of the end of a fabricated life that “Leigh Wren” has lived for six years.

After four years of marriage and fathering her son, now six and a half years old, Nina Mosley’s husband had been exposed as a serial murderer. His crime spree was spread over at least a ten-year period.

How could she have been married to the man for four years and not known? The authorities didn’t think she did. Some folks had their suspicions. Charles Pritchett is convinced she knew, and wants the world to know what he thinks.

And Nina Mosley has carried the knowledge that she lived for a time between suspicion and denial. Pritchett’s arrival forces her to start asking why it took her so long to overcome her denial. What clues did she overlook?

It’s a premise that grabs the reader as few novels do. It has propelled the book (released in March 2008 by St. Martin’s Minotaur) into foreign publication, onto audio disc, and onto the Kindle list at Amazon. It is among some 45 books nominated for the 2009 Edgar Award© as “Best First Novel.”

Book reviews have been almost universal in their praising the book’s premise. However, a large number of them have followed that with a “but….” Almost all the “buts” echo what one reviewer said. The story “falls short of its potential.” The Old Cobbler has a theory about these negative comments coming from the same people who praised the premise.

The reviewers were overwhelmed by the premise, and were expecting too much. It sets an expectation level that any author, even a psychologist or psychiatrist, would have a hard reaching.

One reviewer said the story “slides into a pedestrian story that succumbs to predictability.” Without that point being challenged, it can be said that Floyd’s narrative is equal to or better than that of some well-known authors whose writing factories crank mega-selling novels.

Bill Floyd is to be commended for his effort with a very difficult premise, and St. Martin’s Minotaur for printing the book. The Old Cobbler says THE KILLER’S WIFE is a book to be read, and makes two predictions.

Readers will see future stories from Bill Floyd. The author says he has written six other novels, one or two of which he would like to see published. And within a year, some other author and publisher will tackle the question of what did the wife know and when did she know it.

Readers who wish to do so can hear two interviews with the young author. One is on the Macmillan Web site. The other one can be found on North Carolina Public Radio's Web site..