Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This bone-crunching series launch from Baldacci (To Die For) introduces Walter Nash, an investment banker who transforms into a brutal instrument of vengeance. Nash lives a privileged but uneventful life with his wife, Judith, and teenage daughter, Maggie. Following his estranged father's funeral, Nash is pressured by the FBI to assist in their investigation of his firm's CEO, Everett "Rhett" Temple, who's laundering drug money for Victoria Steers, the ruthless head of a Chinese cartel. Though Nash learns that three of the FBI's previous informants on the Steers investigation were murdered, he agrees to go undercover. After his cover is blown, Victoria's goons kidnap Maggie and frame Nash for child abuse, forcing him to go on the run. Only his father's best friend, Vietnam vet and security expert Isaiah York, can help him punish the people who've torn his family apart. In Baldacci's long list of heroes, Walter Nash is among the most memorable: a truly sympathetic everyman whose gradual hardening into a violent vigilante feels entirely earned. The book's shrewd pacing impresses, even if the narrative ends a touch too abruptly. Wherever Baldacci chooses to take Nash next, readers would be well advised to follow. Agent: Aaron Priest, Aaron M. Priest Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
A workaholic's life turns upside-down in Baldacci's new suspense series. Walter Nash has a wife and a college-age daughter, and he spends every day working on deals for an investment company, at the expense of his family life. When his father passes away, he discovers his father's friends despise him. To make matters worse, the FBI informs him that his boss is using the company to launder money and wants him to provide the documentation they can use to dismantle the operation. Nash agrees to assist the FBI, but when his boss discovers his duplicity, the blowback threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves. Baldacci is, as always, an expert storyteller, and readers will root for Nash as his world falls apart. The storyline and the horror of Nash's experiences are brutal at times, and the novel concludes without a full resolution, suggesting that there is more to his story forthcoming. VERDICT Baldacci ("6:20 Man" novels) has done it again. His new series starter is a worthwhile investment that will have readers eager to follow Nash in his continuing pursuit of justice.--Jeff Ayers
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man. Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius' funeral, where Ty's Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple "a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people." It's "a chance to be a hero," the agent says, while admitting that Nash's personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story's dramatic turn follows Maggie's kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash's innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who'd once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty's undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over--now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he's not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to "not get on that damn plane," so a sequel is a necessity. Hokey plot, good fun. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
