Fiction review: True Blue

FICTION
David Baldacci has a knack for writing best-selling thriller series. Most recently, he has devoted attention to his Camel Club series, as well as adding an installment to his long-running series featuring former Secret Service agents Michelle Maxwell and Sean King.

Now, with "True Blue," the Richmond native has introduced a new character who shows promise for starring in her own series.

As the novel opens, Mace Perry is finishing a two-year prison sentence. Before the conviction, she had been a cop in Washington -- just like her sister, who is the District's police chief. Now Perry's on probation, struggling to recover her reputation and career after being framed for armed robbery. If she solves a big case as a civilian, she reasons, she'll earn back her badge.

"That's all I want, a shot to be a true blue again," Perry tells herself.

Soon, Perry finds a promising case: A lawyer has been murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator in a Georgetown law office. Despite her sister's objections, Perry begins investigating the case with the help of one of the murder victim's law partners.

In between shootouts and car chases, the duo discovers that the murder trail leads to powerful figures in the nation's capital -- maybe as high as the president himself.

Well, maybe not to the president. But certainly to his director of national intelligence, a suave bureaucrat with a ferociously devoted right-hand man who still suffers from the wounds he received while fighting in the Vietnam War.

This isn't the first time an intelligence czar has played a villainous role in a Baldacci novel, but it doesn't get old. Baldacci excels at distinguishing between powerful politicians' good intentions and the inherent flaws they harbor. Among those flaws: excessive self-interest. "[H]e was a cagey politician, meaning that the person he looked out for the most stared back at him in the mirror every morning," Baldacci writes of one successful officeholder.

But while Baldacci's perennial theme -- absolute power corrupts absolutely -- hovers in the background, "True Blue" focuses more often on a gritty, street-level view of the District than it does on its corridors of power. (And it's not the symbol-laden Washington that Dan Brown recently put on display in "The Lost Symbol," either.)

"True Blue" is an absorbing thriller with a powerful message, but readers are most likely to remember it for its superbly appealing protagonist. Perry is smart and street-tough, and her eye for the telling detail in an investigation is unerring. Let's hope she appears in a new Baldacci title soon. From a reader's perspective, it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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