secret identity | Seattle Book Mama

David Baldacci is a veteran mystery writer, but the Walter Nash series is brand new. I was not one of his faithful readers, but I wasn’t sure why, exactly; perhaps in the past, I’d tried picking up one of his books, become distracted by something else, and not gone back to it. So when I was approached by NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing to read and review the first book in this series, I welcomed the opportunity. My thanks go to them even though I didn’t come away enthralled.

Our premise is this: Walter Nash is a high placed executive. He’s courteous and loving, and he works way too many hours at Sybaritic Investments. However, following his father’s funeral, Nash is approached by the FBI. Unbeknownst to him, Sybaritic serves as a money launderer. There’s a lot of money involved. Nash can work with the FBI to expose the two top criminals—his boss, Rhett, and his boss’s boss, Victoria Steers, who heads an international criminal syndicate. Or, he can go down with the ship after the Feds move in, and that will mean a great deal of jail time.

This story reads like the fever dream of a nerdy guy that wishes he were a mean, lean fighting machine. Good ole Walt would never commit an act of violence of any kind, but now, gosh, shucks, he just has to. He gets a new name, is sent out to train himself in martial arts and every other sort of physical badassery; his head is shaved, and it and nearly every other part of his physique is covered in tattoos. The new Walt is bad, bad, bad, and darn, isn’t this fun?

Meanwhile, let’s look at the female characters in this tale. His daughter, whom he loved but I did not—entitled, wealthy brat—dies. The bad guys get her, and that becomes his justification for everything that follows. (This happens early on.) His wife, it turns out, has been sleeping around and isn’t all that attached to him, despite the vast resources he has placed at her very fingertips. Victoria Steers, the boss lady, is a sociopath, ordering people tortured and/or killed without her pulse quickening. It’s just business. And then we have two side characters, Walt’s stepmother—also immoral, having slept with Walt while married to his dad—is one, and the other is Rhett’s little sister, who is intellectually disabled. In short, we have a number of women that have no redeeming qualities, and none that are both capable and decent.

So, what’s not to love here? (Eye roll.)

The end of the book isn’t an ending, and while I get it that Baldacci is starting a new series and wants to keep readers invested, I’m ready to climb off the bus. Now that I know this author’s general trajectory, I know enough.

So if you enjoy this sort of thing, don’t care even a little about plausible plots and scenarios, and have little enough regard for women that you don’t mind these Madonna/whore characters, then good for you. Pull out your plastic and dive into this series. As for me, I need a shower and some mouthwash.

Nope.

An Honest Lie is a thriller by Tarryn Fisher. Thanks go to Harper Collins for the review copies; I wish I had something good to say, but the truth is, this is one of the worst written novels I have seen in my many years of reviewing and blogging.

Our protagonist is Rainy, although we learn that her given name is Summer; she fled a terrifying cult earlier, and she changed her name to make herself harder to find. Now she is living in an upscale home on a mountain in eastern Washington State with her boyfriend; her boyfriend is trying to integrate her into his friends’ group, and has pressured her into going on a “girls’ trip” to Vegas while he is travelling on business. She goes, though only because she sees no way out. He bought her a ticket; she should be a good sport.

The story changes point of view from present, to past, etcetera, and we see the cult where she was more or less imprisoned in the Nevada desert during her childhood. However, adult Rainy doesn’t develop much, at least during the initial sixty percent, which is as far as I am willing to read. Fisher has wrapped Rainy’s character and the suspenseful aspects of the story together to such an extent that she can’t let us see much of the character without giving away plot points that she is saving for later. Consequently, I get tired of Rainy’s whiney anxiety fairly early in the book. But that’s not what limits this story to a two star rating.

Here’s the insurmountable problem. As noted, Rainy is an anxious mess, and the mere idea of setting foot in Nevada nearly undoes her. When they get to their swank hotel, the women discover that all of the bedrooms but one has a gorgeous desert view; the last one, the one with the view of the parking lot, is the one Rainy requests, because just looking out the window and seeing the desert is triggering for her.

And yet, somewhere shy of the fifty percent mark, Rainy hops into a cab and pays the driver to take her to the little town closest to the compound from which she escaped, and suddenly she’s playing detective, asking questions and snooping around. And reader, there is no development that explains this; there’s no aha moment where she gathers her wits and develops a plan of some sort. We aren’t even all that clear what it is that she hopes to achieve, out there in the scary, triggering desert all by her lonesome. Our protagonist goes from I-can’t-look-at-the-desert-or-I’ll-have-an-anxiety-attack-and-nightmares, to I-think-I’ll-go-see-the-place-and-maybe-seek-vengeance with no segue way, no clear goal, even.

If I were to guess, I’d say maybe the author changed a whole section of the story during the latter stages, and the sequencing and character’s motivation got messed up due to sloppy editing, but I don’t really know what went so badly wrong. It isn’t my job to know why this book is a train wreck. Whatever the reason, the result is an insult to the reader’s intelligence. I feel this way, and I got to read it free. How might others feel once they’ve shelled out the purchase price?

This book is for sale now, but I don’t recommend it to you.