Inside-the-Beltway twist enhances thriller

FICTION

Forget power-mad intelligence czars and the dangers posed by an unregulated war on terror, the subjects of Richmond native David Baldacci's recent thrillers. Garden-variety kidnapping (with a twist) drives his riveting new book, "First Family."

Granted, the settings will be familiar to Baldacci aficionados.

"First Family" opens at Camp David, the presidential retreat, where first lady Jane Cox is throwing a birthday party for her 12-year-old niece, Willa. And several scenes take place in the White House, familiar Baldacci territory.

"First Family" isn't about the White House per se, though. It follows Willa, who is kidnapped from her home hours after leaving the birthday party. Soon, she is swept far from the Beltway to a place where few people care about the intricacies of Washington power structures or the dangers they sometimes pose to democracy.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Back to the crime scene . . .

Summoned earlier by Willa's mother for a potential job, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, private investigators making their fourth appearance in a Baldacci thriller, show up at the family's home and stumble onto the crime just as the kidnappers are leaving.

Maxwell exchanges gunfire with one of the kidnappers, who proves to be well-armed and relatively impervious behind military-grade body armor.

After the kidnappers speed away, Maxwell rushes into the house and finds her partner King kneeling over the body of Willa's mother.

"Her throat had been shredded," Baldacci writes, and strange letters in a foreign language had been written on her arms.

A quick search of the house reveals Willa's siblings are unconscious and presumably drugged by the kidnappers. Their father is unconscious as well, with one side of his face badly bruised.

Pointedly, Maxwell and King fail to find Willa, and they quickly report the kidnapping.

Then the private investigators notice something peculiar: Why isn't there more blood on the floor around Willa's mother? Soon, they discover the reason. The kidnappers drew the woman's blood and took an unknown amount with them. But why?

Answers aren't readily forthcoming, and with the search for Willa turning up few promising leads, the first lady asks King and Maxwell to take up the case. As they begin sifting for clues, a teeming array of suspects and motives surfaces.

Was the dead woman's husband having an affair and looking for a way to end their marriage? Was his role as a defense contractor working on projects for the Department of Homeland Security to blame? Could he have been the target of terrorists or competitors? Or is the White House -- with the president seeming to coast toward re-election, barring scandals -- somehow connected?

While the book doesn't pursue the politically charged, topical themes that drove Baldacci's recent thrillers, it teems with the well-researched, inside-the-Beltway details we expect from him.

Baldacci knows how to construct a superb Washington thriller with a smorgasbord of suspects, a detailed peek at inside-the-Beltway machinations and a narrative that never offers a moment to set the book down.

It's the appealing characters and the emotions their plights provoke in us that make "First Family" stand out, though. They're also what separates Baldacci from a crowded field of best-selling thriller writers.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.