Long Road to Mercy by David Baldacci

It’s been a long while since I’ve read a novel by David Baldacci, who is a prolific writer of thrillers, but I’m glad I gave him another try. His female protagonist in Long Road to Mercy is Atlee Pine, an FBI Special Agent. It’s the first of four books about Agent Pine and I’ve already acquired book II in the series. 

 

Atlee has a most intriguing history. She was born as an identical twin, but at the age of six, a man broke into their bedroom in the middle of the night and abducted Atlee’s twin, Mercy, and Mercy was never seen again. Meanwhile, Atlee became a highly successful athlete. She missed an Olympics team as a weightlifter by a tiny margin, and then she joined the FBI. She rapidly progressed with her assignments in the FBI and was promoted. Given her choice of assignments, rather than go to one of the high action centers like DC or NY, she chose to live in St. George, Utah. She was an outdoors woman and since the disappearance of her sister, she had mostly been a loner. In St. George, other than having a secretary, she ran a one-person office and was often the only federal law enforcement officer for hundreds of miles.

 

While pursuing a bizarre case of a slaughtered mule in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Atlee also remained driven to solve her sister’s case. She came to suspect that the perpetrator of the kidnapping might have been Daniel James Tor, a man who had been captured as a serial killer. He was convicted and placed in the supermax federal prison in Colorado. She managed to get an interview with him – so the book started out with that dramatic encounter with this very frightening psychopath. 

 

I liked the fact that Atlee was not a two-dimensional character. She struggled with her relationships, and the story benefitted by the relationship she developed with her secretary, Carol Blum, who was rogue in her own right. The investigation into the slaughtered mule led to a plot to unseat the federal government. The book was written in 2018, so it predated the mess in DC by two years.

 

This is an excellent thriller and Pine is a compelling character. David Baldacci, welcome back to our blog.