Baldacci finally gives us a Puller worth respecting

I’ve done what I had promised myself I wouldn’t do again, which is to read another Baldacci novel about Jack Reacher knock-off John Puller. I hated the first Puller novel and disliked the second. And so I was pleasantly surprised that Baldacci brought his “Camel Club” game to this latest novel, a political thriller with high stakes, fascinating characters and a surprisingly subdued and more human Puller revealing less of the super-hero and more of the grit and angst of a real person. Baldacci, a very competent author, still has a lot of work to do to make the dialogue of his Puller novels realistic, but his plot was mostly fascinating, with lots of turns and twists. And then, of course, there was the core of the novel and its chief draw: brother hunting brother.

Army investigator Puller discovers that his beloved elder brother Robert, formerly a highly respected Air Force computer genius and strategist who had been sentenced two years earlier to life imprisonment for treason, has escaped under highly suspect conditions from a maximum security military prison at Leavenworth, leaving behind an unidentified corpse in his cell. Puller is not only not ordered away from the investigation, but is inexplicably deployed to lead it by three top-level military and intelligence figures. It turns out that some people never really believed Robert Puller was a traitor, others want him not returned to prison but dead, and still others are using the investigation into his escape to root out some very high-level real traitors in the ranks.

The escape itself—supposedly impossible—is detailed at the very beginning of the novel in an edge-of-the seat action sequence, and the knitting together of how it came is the result of John Puller’s special investigative genius and Baldacci’s special flair for drama. But the why, and who is out to kill both Pullers throughout the novel, isn’t revealed until well into the story. By then, I was too hooked to care that all the ridiculously narrow escapes are nearly as far-fetched and flawed as in Baldacci’s earlier Puller novels.

For me, the finer aspect of the novel lies in the interaction of the two brothers, and in turn their interaction with their father, a former Army general of near mythical stature reduced to institutionalization for advanced Alzheimers. Throw into the mix an extremely complex and slow-burning romantic interest for the usually solitary Puller, and the rather terrifying assumption that traitors can and do infiltrate our military and intelligence communities, and you’ve got the beginning—finally—of a series worth pursuing.