Product Description

‘I need a war . . .’

Nicolas Creel, a super-rich arms dealer, decides that the best way to boost his business is to start a new cold war – and he won’t let anything or anyone get in his way.

As international tensions rise and the superpowers line up against each other, the lives of three very different people will never be the same again. As intelligence agent Shaw, academic Anna Fischer and ambitious journalist Katie James are all drawn into Creel’s games, can anything stop the world from spiralling out of control?

This terrifying global thriller delivers all the twists and turns, emotional drama, unforgettable characters and can’t-put-it-down pacing that Baldacci fans expect – and still goes beyond anything he’s written before.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39501 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-17
• Released on: 2008-10-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Many are the lawyers who have ditched the day job and had taken up an even more lucrative profession: that of writing thrillers. But of the army of hopefuls who have followed the example of John Grisham, few are as talented and inventive as David Baldacci, who (in such books as Simple Genius) has demonstrated a writing skill streets in advance of most of his career-shifting contemporaries. The Whole Truth continues his upward trajectory, and adds a new level of narrative complexity that still avoids getting in the way of sheer storytelling momentum.

Wealthy arms dealer Nicholas Creel is facing his own personal credit crunch, and needs to find a way to kickstart his business. Would starting a war help? Creel would hardly be averse to that. Anna Fischer is enjoying her professorial activities, but is growing dismayed at world events. Her life is transformed when her new lover proposes marriage -- but there is a side to her boyfriend's life that may threaten all she holds dear. Journalist Katie James is casting around for a way to salvage her stalled career, when something falls into her lap -- a story with very dangerous elements. And the mysterious Shaw, operative for a clandestine intelligence organisation, wants to give it all up -- but finds that an employer wants him to tackle one final all-important job.

As this very varied dramatis personae suggests, we are in the presence of an ambitious global thriller here, with a host of elements juggled to facilitate an ever-accelerating plot. Baldacci -- a writer who prefers the straight-ahead effect rather than the more nuanced touch -- is an absolute master of the blockbuster thriller, and as well as keeping the narrative on the boil, manages to delineate his cast of characters with a sure touch. The Whole Truth is Baldacci's most entertaining novel yet. --Barry Forshaw

About the Author

David Baldacci is the author of fifteen previous consecutive New York Times bestsellers. With his books published in over 40 languages in more than 80 countries, and with nearly 70 million copies in print, he is one of the world’s favourite storytellers.

Customer Reviews

Dreadful disappointment
In the past Baldacci's books have been well written, exciting and the scenarios contained a sufficient element of believability to be disturbing. This is just rubbish, and rather badly written rubbish at that. It relies on several "With one bound Carruthers was free" situations, the characters are strictly cardboard cut-out, and not even consistent, and Baldacci clearly knows very little about London. By the end I was beginning to develop a good deal of sympathy for the aims of the archetypal arch-villain.

Flashy, plastic and pointless
I've found Baldacci's work to be variable in the past - some of them can make a long journey fly as well though-out and well written thrillers. Others are distinctly unmemorable. This is by some distance the worst I've read.
The whole thing is basically ludicrous and not recovered by a thoroughly predictable plot. One single unexpected thing happens in the whole book - from that point on you could write the rest of the story and be spot on. The characters are plastic and unconvincing; the idiot-level explanations of their motivations and "the way the world really works" grate from early on and some of the crowbarred-in supposed "secret service insider" detail harks back to the worst of Frederick Forsyth telling you what sequence the cylinders in the tank engine fire in.
Going to London before writing about it might have been a good idea too if you expect people who actually have been there to take you seriously. Don't buy this - the rest of his books that I've read have been better.

Don't bother
This book was terrible. The men are steel-hard, the women are sobbing and has tears in their eyes all the time. That's the deep characters. The other characters are plain cardboard copies. Such rubbish. And if it was a desk where you could return the book because it was so ill written and bad I would have done that!