DAYLIGHT

5 stars out of 5

When it comes to series characters from this author, military investigator John Puller earns top honors as far as I'm concerned - with FBI agent Atlee Pine a fairly close second. Bring them together, and, well, I'm in character heaven. Officially, this is the third in the Pine series, and she's still doing her darndest to find her twin sister, Mercy - who was kidnapped some 30 years earlier and hasn't been seen since. At the moment, Pine is taking a few days away from her remote Arizona base to follow a trail to Georgia, where she learns the name of her sister's kidnapper.

The follow-up puts Atlee and her capable assistant, Carol Blum, in Trenton, N.J.; there, she locates a relative of the kidnapper and hopes he's got some beans to spill. But in a fluke, he runs away - and Pine runs smack dab into Puller, who was there to arrest the same guy in connection with a drug ring. After she explains what she was after, she and Puller pay a visit to the runaway's father, who's in jail - only to have the interview inexplicably cut short. When other avenues of investigation - of both Pine's sister's disappearance and Puller's drug case - are slammed shut, they realize that some kind of cover-up is happening at the highest levels of government. 

Needless to say, that only makes them more determined to ferret out the truth, and Puller enlists help from his very capable Air Force brother, Robert. Only one thing is certain: the two cases share commonalities, which means Pine and Puller jointly commandeer a substantial portion of the book (Puller makes so many appearances, in fact, that it took the ending, which focuses more on Pine, to remind me whose book this really is). But that's a plus for fans of both series, who I expect will enjoy the interaction between two top-dog characters as much as I did.

Most everything gets resolved in the end, but not without plenty of action, losses of life and near misses thereof. What isn't, I presume, will become the premise of the next book - to which I am, of course, looking forward. Just as an aside, though, I will advise those who haven't read the other two Atlee Pine books to start at the beginning; I'm sure I was able to hit the ground running with this one simply because I was familiar with her story. Overall, though, I don't hesitate to call this one another winner.

Daylight by David Baldacci (Grand Central Publishing, November 2020); 416 pp.