Walk the Wire

by David Baldacci

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There’s a genre of mysteries/thrillers that focus on the FBI and threats to national security which many readers love. David Baldacci writes quite a few of them, and his books are eminently readable. An added bonus is that you often get to learn a lot about the place they’re set. Walk the Wire is one of Baldacci’s most recent books, and is a fascinating depiction of what it’s like in a North Dakota fracking town.

We have an interview with David Baldacci on his favourite classic mystery books (where he also talks his literacy charity, the Wish You Well Foundation).

Best Mystery Books of 2020

The book, according to the author

Walk The Wire is the sixth instalment in the Amos Decker series. He’s a former American footballer who suffered a brain trauma on the field that gave him a condition called hyperthymesia and another condition called synesthesia. So, the brain is rewiring around the damaged parts caused by the trauma. When that happens, the rewired pathways go into areas of the brain that have not been not fully accessed before. For Decker, the big change is in memory. Hyperthymesia means perfect recall. So, he really can’t forget anything. That’s a good thing for a detective, but a bad thing if you’re a person trying to get over some terrible losses, which Decker has had in his past. And when your brain changes, your personality changes. When he was a younger man, he was very gregarious and outgoing. Now, he’s very aloof and perhaps on the spectrum somewhere. He doesn’t pick up on social cues and he has to live with that.

In Walk The Wire, Decker and his FBI partner Alex Jamison travel to North Dakota in the middle of the fracking boom. A young woman has been found murdered and a post-mortem has been done on the body by the killer. They need to figure out who killed her and why it was done in that way. It really leads them to all these deep and dark secrets in this little town. There’s also an Air Force facility located there with something mysterious going on. There’s also a religious colony there which owns some land around the military facility and was where the dead woman worked as a schoolteacher. And surrounding all of this is a multibillion-dollar oil and gas drilling operation. It’s high stakes and multiple plots are going on in the novel. At the same time as I was developing the thriller/mystery part of it, I was also trying to further develop Decker’s character.

The device I used for that was to bring his brother-in-law, who works at one of the fracking companies out there. Decker had no idea he was even there. That gives us some glimpses into pre-brain-trauma Decker—who he used to be. Obviously, his brother-in-law has known him a very long time. It also forces Decker throughout the course of the book and at the end to make some important and critical personal choices vis-à-vis his family.

David Baldacci on The Best Mystery Books