©Guy Bell
David Baldacci
David Baldacci is one of the world’s bestselling and favourite thriller writers. With over 130 million copies in print, his books are published in over eighty territories and forty-five languages, and have been adapted for both feature-film and television. David is also the co-founder, along with his wife, of the Wish You Well Foundation®, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting literacy efforts across the US.
Books by David Baldacci
“One Good Deed follows a WWII combat vet who is just out of prison and gets offered a job to collect a debt—and soon finds himself embroiled in a small-town murder. Beautiful prose, a compelling plot, but it’s the anti-hero protagonist who makes this book shine.” Read more...
Anthony Franze, Thriller and Crime Writer
Walk the Wire
by David Baldacci
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.
Interviews with David Baldacci
The Best Mystery Books, recommended by David Baldacci
The best mystery books are completely unputdownable and addictive, the entertainment they provide more portable than watching TV and so much more satisfying than looking at your phone. Bestselling author David Baldacci, one of the masters of the genre and a passionate advocate for literacy and reading, talks us through some of the best mystery books ever written—as well as the contemporary authors he most admires.
Interviews where books by David Baldacci were recommended
The Best Thrillers of 2020, recommended by Anthony Franze
Every year, the International Thriller Writers awards highlight the best new thrillers of the previous year. Anthony Franze, administrator of the awards and an acclaimed thriller author in his own right, talks us through their 2020 shortlist for the best new thriller published in hardback.
