2021 Books: Walk the Wire by David Baldacci

Walk the Wire by David Baldacci
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've enjoyed the previous novels in this series much more than I did Walk the Wire. The main character, Amos Decker, remains as sharply written as ever, continuing to struggle with the mental and emotional issues that have marked his story thus far. The pacing of Walk the Wire is ramped up, however, to a frenetic pitch, and the addition of a second plot just leads to jumps in logic and action that feel unjustified and far too rushed.

The second plot is a crossover of characters from another Baldacci series. While other authors have pulled this off well (I'm thinking particularly of Without Remorse, Tom Clancy's masterpiece that details John Clark's origin story), Walk the Wire doesn't hit home with the same impact. Some pieces are in place to make this an excellent story, but it's just too rushed, too busy, too slipshod to work as well as previous entries in this series have done.

All that said, I did devour this one pretty quickly on a brief summer getaway to Minnesota, which can be a lot of fun in its own right. It's not a terrible novel - I've read plenty of those along the way. This one just could have been better, and it's a shame it wasn't. I'll look forward to the next Amos Decker book in the hopes that it'll be more like its excellent predecessors than Walk the Wire turned out to be.

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