Cat-and-mouse game

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/05/2023 (1220 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Financial forensic sleuth Mickey Gibson gets a call from the office to check out a scarpered fraudster’s home for seizable assets — in a spooky old mansion (golly), she finds a secret room (gosh), and within that secret room Mickey finds (gasp) a murdered corpse.

And off we go in Simply Lies, the first murder mystery prolific American thriller author David Baldacci has written in a very long time.

Mickey is a former cop, former thespian, former just-too-short-to-go-pro basketball star, but she’s not the interchangeable hero of extraordinary combat skills that usually headlines Baldacci’s conspiracy-against-America blow ’em up, shoot ’em up adventures.

We quickly learn that while the woman from work who dispatched Mickey knew a lot about her and her huge private security firm employer, no one at headquarters had ever heard of her.

Well, this is a conundrum.

We’ll call the mystery woman Clarisse, one of the most frequent among her many aliases. She has electronic gizmos everywhere, wigs galore, can change her face in 60 seconds flat, has disparate clothes stashed in bus station washrooms all over the place — if Clark Kent can change in a phone booth (ask your grandparents), Clarisse can change in a stall.

We learn that Clarisse has scads of money through blackmailing rich important men who can’t afford scandal, men whose brains are… let’s just say, they find Clarisse quite beguiling.

As for Mickey, she was a New Jersey cop, but couldn’t afford to stay on the job after her husband proved to be a cad, emptying out their bank account and vanishing without a trace, leaving Mickey a pauper with two toddlers. Her spidey-sense has its limitations.

Baldacci’s plot somehow involves a mob accountant who sang for the feds and went into witness protection, taking with him and hiding incredible amounts of ill-gotten cash. A lot of people want it.

There’s a cop who seems a little off, a U.S. marshal who lost a protected witness or two, a mysterious couple not only greedy but vengeful, people with dementia in nursing homes, a vicious godfather whose retired FBI agent dad wants to put his own kid in prison… Baldacci makes it really complicated.

Baldacci tells us that the feds sometimes stash several protected witnesses and their families in the same community — all the easier and cheaper to keep an eye on them. Those folks, of course, never recognize signs of their own frightened looking-over-their-shoulders existence in any of their neighbours, and never get to talking after half a dozen stiff drinks…

Baldacci does tell us repeatedly that most people in witness protection programs are criminals, but a notch or two below the bosses whom they serve up in court. He also informs us that the feds won’t act against any criminal activities people commit after they go into witness protection, because to do so would deter future informants from coming forward.

Suffice to say that some people in Simply Lies are not just criminals, they’re evil, disgustingly evil. And getting away with it.

All the while, Clarisse is manipulating Mickey, while Mickey tries to detectify who Clarisse is and turn the tables on her, while solving the murder and hunting for the treasure. And being a single mother of two pre-schoolers.

And again, all the while, because so many characters went into witness protection with their families, the reader is trying to catch up to Mickey as she ferrets out who people are and who they used to be.

Does it work?

Pretty much, though Baldacci makes it really, really complex. Devoted Baldacci readers expecting Mickey to suddenly reveal superpowers and blast away a whole pile of villains may be disappointed.

And you’ll want to avoid asking too many personal questions about your new neighbours who seem kind of reticent about sharing their life stories and have no Facebook presence until two years ago.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin is glad that mobsters tracking down people in witness protection never thought of using Google.