Daylight by David Baldacci is the third installment in the Atlee Pine series, although it can also be viewed as a crossover novel.
It finds the strong and fearless FBI agent Atlee Pine on sabbatical, working with her assistant Carol Blum. Her focus is to gather information on a cold case; that involving the abduction of her twin sister Mercy, and her own serious injuries some 30 years earlier. Nobody has seen Mercy since. Altee doesn’t know if she is alive or dead, and she is determined to find out.
Aware that her family’s connection to the mob may have led to retaliation by one Ito Vincenzo, her journey to find the truth is a layered, dark and dangerous one.
Timing being everything, her discovery of the whereabouts of Anthony Vincenzo, Ito’s grandson, unfortunately obstructs an operation headed by Army CID personnel, John Puller; a character who figures prominently in another Baldacci series.
When a special agent is gunned down, it doesn’t make sense to Pine that the shooter is a young man who appeared to have a promising future, so she bolts into investigator mode.
That leads her on a complicated and dangerous path into the deepest levels of the criminal underworld where the tendrils creep farther and grow darker than anyone could have imagined.
While the procedure is interesting and Pine’s backstory is compelling, Daylight is a tangled read.
Although it comes full circle, it seems at times that the search for Mercy is overtaken and overshadowed by the interconnected investigation that deals with criminals, drugs and politics, which personally, was not my cup of tea.
Unfortunately, I grew frustrated by many chapter-ending cliff-hangers which didn’t resume for another chapter or so.
On the plus side, the last section of Daylight was very exciting. It really took off and kept me reading.
The events preceding the ending were disturbing, and completely unpredictable. The outcome, however, was disappointing and perhaps left to more die-hard fans.
Daylight
An Atlee Pine thriller
David Baldacci
Grand Central Publishing 2020
416 pages
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